Philosophy of Success

Alain de Botton, a philosopher, a writer with several bestsellers, a witty guy, I happened to read 2 books written by him, 《How Proust Can change your life》&《The Consollaions of Philosophy》, I like them. So when I saw he had a Talk in TEDGlobal 2009, I took no hestation to watch it despite of the unbearable network speed.

It's amazing to see real person, besides, it is a kinder、gentler philosophy of success as evaluated. He did make quite an eloquent case to re-examine our career anxiety, the idea of success and failure, the job snobbery...... He made you laugh first, then think and contemplate. Go to watch it.

Here are some points from his:

The reason we are sufferring from career anxiety:

1. snobbery: we are surrounded by it.
The definition of snobbery: Someone who takes a small part of you and use that to come to a complete vision of who you are.
What people want from luxury goods, it is the reward of acquisition of it rather than goods itself.

2. envy: link to the spirit of equality
If you can not relate to someone, you will not envy him. In fact, the closer the people are, the stronger and the more danger the envy is.

3. meritocracy socity:
If people get talented, energy, skills, you will go top, nothing should hold you back. Your position in life does not come to be acceditental, everybody deserve what they get to, which makes people take what happened to them extremly personal, in turn to make failure seem much more crunching.

4. failure:
The failure is not loss of money, time etc. What we feel about it is the judgement and ridicule of others.

5. success:
There is very strong force to define what the success is to you, however, you should have your own idea of the success, try to get what you really want.

There is no justice in the world, the life is always unfair. The right attitude is: We should do everything we can to pursuit justice, but at the end of a day, we should always remember whatever facing us, whatever happened in our life has a strong element of haphazard.