How Love Defines Life

Success Built to Last

by

Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson

"The only place where you find success before work is in the dictionary."

~Mary V. Smith

(as cited in Porras 35)

                  This Quote can be proven time and time again all throughout history, as well as in present day. A person cannot inherit success, they have to achieve it for them-selves. Some of the benefits of success such as money, property and even power can be inherited, however, the heirs are not typically the ones who worked for it, nor are they the ones who reap the full benefit of the work and toil. Truly, one of the best examples of this is displayed in the movie The Ultimate Gift. In the movie the patriarch of a extremely wealthy family has died. During the funeral, and later when the family meets at the law firm, it becomes clear that the children (middle age adults now) and grandchildren (most of which are teenagers, except for the main character, Jason who is about 23) are all spoiled rotten by the wealth earned by the patriarch. It is clear that the only reason that the relatives are there is to try to get as much from the patriarch's wealth as they can. The head lawyer distributes some of the wealth to the relations; they are all highly disappointed with their inheritance despite all of them having received land, stocks, etc worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Then comes Jason; who finds that his grandfather left him to a series of videos that lead to a series of gifts. These gifts include: the gift of Family, the gift of Money, the gift of Work and many more. Throughout the movie, Jason accomplishes dozens of difficult tasks and by the end is a changed person who proceeds to do what he feels strongly about for other people.

               I realize that I am terrible at movie reviews, however, I believe that this film expresses exactly how I feel about working for your own success.

"It's dangerous not to do what you love. The harsh truth is that if you don't love what you're doing, you'll lose to someone who does! For every person who is half-hearted about their work or relationships, there is someone else who loves what they're half-hearted about" (35). 

             How much more blunt can it be? If you do not have the passion, enthusiasm and positive motivation for something---- a job, relationship, or other--- then you will only go so far before you smack your nose on a brick wall; whether the wall be layoffs, grades, or in some cases, survival. A perfect example of this is the nursing field; it is extremely competitive and you have to have a love for it to succeed. If you do not have the love to motivate you then you will sink and someone else with more passion will take your place. 

"Celebrating what's right with the world is an excruciatingly unhip and uncool thing to do. We are carefully trained by safety-conscious parents, in-laws, institutions of higher learning, and the evening news to ignore or ridicule optimistic people" (43)

              This fact is depressingly true. From birth we are trained that optimism is bad and that people who are optimistic will come to a disastrous end. I myself encounter this with my schooling. I hold learning very close to my heart and sometimes find it difficult to get around the fact that many people do not care about education and they proceed to ridicule those who do. Simply finding a good study partner can be a discouraging and degrading process.