True Success

The TED talk that former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden gave was about what true success is and how it is measured. Wooden said that true success is when a person takes themselves and their given situation and makes it the best it can be. People need to focus on making themselves the best they can possibly be, not on how other can be better. The way that Wooden spoke about success was using stories from his own personal experiences and quotes from other respected people on how to be successful. It was remarkable to see someone his age that could memorize all of those quotes and speak with such clarity and authority. I see this view of true success as something that has been lost in almost every aspect of life, both in education and in society. Education today is about trying to make the students the best that they should be; to hold them up to a certain standard and that they should at least equal it if not surpass it. More classes in schools need to focus on how well the student can do and appreciate the effort that the student can give. Teachers and other people in education need to realize that one student's best effort may be how another student does when they don't try. As long as the student is trying their best, there is no need to push students more than what they can handle. I see grades as a way of making students try too hard and end up not caring anymore. Grades should either not exist or be way more lenient for different students. In society as a whole, people are expected to act a certain way and to live up to a specific standard. Society needs to change it's thinking to allowing people to be themselves and to be accepted that way and not have to conform to how everyone else wants them to be. Success is a measure of how well a person does for themselves and not how society views success.