From Ambition to Aspiration, from Acquiring to Becoming.

From Ambition to Aspiration, From Acquiring to Becoming.

"Make money and the whole world will conspire to call you a gentleman."

- Mark Twain

It's been a century since the great author's demise but how appropriately these words ring true. If one is wealthy, if one owns many cars, a large house, if one wears expensive clothes he is immediately branded a success. It is because of our wish to quantify success in order to find out how successful a man is that we started assessing what a person possessed. The more he possessed the more successful he was thought to be. We did not stop, even for a moment, to think that maybe success is not about what one has acquired but what one has achieved.

This merits an even deeper question. Why do we need to be successful? What is so good about being successful that every civil society that we know of attaches so much merit to it? Isn't it more important to first do your duty towards your family, the society you live in and to humanity as whole? I believe that it is so. I believe that it is the duty, the moral responsibility, the purpose of each and every individual to fulfil his duties first and then run after success. In the pursuit of his duties if he achieves distinction, if he is lauded with praise, if he has become the individual that he has the potential to be then that is as well, but to forgo one's duty to be successful, to acquire so as to be termed successful is, I believe a sin.

It is because success began to be measured with the amount of possessions one had, because society started giving respect to those who had acquired and looked demeaningly at those who didn't, that the way youth thought about ambition changed. From being a virtue which drove an individual to achieve, from being synonymous with aspiration, ambition became a force that compelled the individual to acquire. The youth figured that if he owns an expensive watch his friends in college will think better of him, if he wears expensive branded clothes he will be known as the 'cool dude' in campus. This feeling matured in him as he grew older. The yearning to be accepted, loved and respected forced him to acquire more and more and in this frenzy he forgot the importance of excellence. To aspire, to achieve, to do good, to attain distinction was left by the wayside in his pursuit of wealth. Sadly we have reached such a state of avarice that it has become difficult for the youth to see through the mist of wealth, power or fame and become the true individual that one can be. It has come to such a sorry state that one may acquire wealth not only to use it but simply to hoard it. Acquisition has become an end in itself, as is rightly said by Abraham Cowley in Of Avarice

"There are two sorts of avarice; the one is but of a