When these goals are achieved, we are happy. When they are not, we are disappointed. We base our lives on achievements, from points attained in the leaving cert, to gold medals won at Olympic levels. The greater the achievement, the greater the person. – Correct?
No.
People shouldn’t be defined by the number of medals hanging from their necks, nor by the number of academic achievements they have received. Each individual is different. We all have different strengths, different abilities. It’s not the ability to win a World Title that makes us great, anybody with a good mind set and a performance enhancing drug is capable of that. What makes us great, is the ability to put in the effort and passion to win a World Title and if we do not succeed, try again.
It is hard to get to the top, achieving what you want to achieve, especially if your aims are high. What’s harder, is picking yourself up after you have fallen from the top, which can make or break us. It's not how we get there either, it's what we do to get there, the efforts we make, the enthusiasm we put in.
A pessimist will see a failure, as a failure; an optimist will see a failure as a lesson. How we choose to interpret a failure, is completely up to ourselves.
So, what defines us is the question you ask?
We, ourselves should define who we are, and what we want to be, not society, not our parents, not our achievements, not what we do, but how we do it.
''What we do does not define who we are. What defines us is how well we rise after falling.''
-HP