When reading the title of this blog, you would expect it to discuss success in societal definitions.
In other words, you will expect that this post will go at length to make you think -
-success: what is it that you really want because you love it.
-success: what is it that you really love but don't want to own.
-success: what it is that you despise but still want because your friends/relatives/peers want you to want it.
-success: what it is that you really don't give a damn to, but still want because your enemy loves/hates it.
-last but not the least (and how could I have forgotten it!), what makes you successful
Well, actually, none of it.
This post will analyze success not as a social phenomena, but as a biological need.
A complete 180 degree reversal from what you expected?
Well, it's needed. Because we are talking about the thing that makes us go round 24 hours, 7 days.
We want to build up our theory on some example postulates. So postulates like "The need for success in a man is similar to a need for success for a dog/lion/duck", "Monkey was less inclined to succeed than a homo-sapiens" and so on.
Darwinially (the adverb I just coined), yes.
Man want success not because of a psychological characteristic called Ambition, but because something much deeper within him as a species. Something inner that drives him for food, something basic that makes him starve for sex - similar something drives him crazy for success. The more openly he accepts and follows this hunger, more successful he becomes in socially acceptable norms. The more he suppresses this primal need, more he suffers.
Come back to evolution: Darwin was the one who firstly claimed it is man's fitness success to have survived.
Likewise, every organism fights its way to survive, to grow, and to rule.
If at some day man fails to function because of the evils he has done to mother nature, the process will not be different from a stock-exchange graphs - which is a mere short-span manifest of our need to surround ourselves with success/failure.
Fitness today is never limited to physical state. Mental fitness has worldwide acceptability as a basic right.
Success plays an important psychological factor in his multi-dimensional development.
In order to be fit, man needs to accept 'need for success'.
Ultimate success or failure is a natural selection (Darwin again!), and is an implicit ingredient in every animal's life.
