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Relationship between motivation and rewards
The concept of success in modern society
The concept of success in modern society
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Recommended: Relationship between motivation and rewards
The Philosophy of Winning in Society Today:
Indeed Crucial in Life, but Not the ‘Only Thing’
Insofar as today’s economy can be considered task-oriented, or characterized by an approach to life that focuses on fulfilling certain requirements to accomplish concomitant goals, the concept of “winning” presides over nearly every aspect of one’s professional life. Defined as the achievement of a predetermined objective, “to win” is the conscious or unconscious impetus behind many of our personal or vocational endeavors alike. Even ambitions as prosaic as a determination to arrive at the office earlier than one’s coworkers can be understood as driven by a desire to win. For those who hold this perspective, then, “winning” can quickly become the overarching
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It also disrupts that common narrative that the desire to win is based on a desire for compensation: winners, after all, receive more financial and social capital and can use these resources to voice their strategies and beliefs to the world. On the other hand, losers are left to question their mistakes and doubt their character, identity, and abilities. Redmond, by exploding that traditional binary by both losing the race and winning the collective imagination, demonstrates how a single individual can take on characteristics from both sides of the equation. When society takes a closer look at its paragons of success – athletes, movie stars, business leaders, politicians, and celebrities – a more complex picture emerges. It often becomes clear that one’s fame or visibility is the product of accomplishments and failures, wins and losses, and therefore that winning itself is not the sole guarantor of …show more content…
Ambition in any sphere can lead to tension and stress. Moments of failure and setbacks can be humiliating, embarrassing, and discouraging. Winning itself can also be chimerical – every new success potentially opens new doors to new challenges, leaving the subject bereft of any moment of true fulfillment. The structure of addiction comes into play: victory reignites the desire to win even more than failure whets the appetite for the same. The desire to win can also lead one to use competition as the only measure of self-worth, a perspective that can lead to the atrophy of self-knowledge and any other barometer of self-awareness. A win-at-all-costs approach can negatively affect relationships with family, friends, and business associates, sowing division and enmity and leading to the destruction of all for the sake of the victory. Lastly, the drive to win can often privilege short-term gains at the expense of long-term solutions
In David Foster Wallace’s essay, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” he argues that the true talent of star athletes is to completely engross themselves in playing the game. While worshipping the “abstractions like power and grace and control” of Tracy Austin, he notes the contradicting quality, her inability to articulate such abstracts (143). He continues by writing, as people’s expectation while reading the autobiography of a successful athlete is to take a peek at the secrets of their god given gifts, whereas the expectations are rarely met, making spectators, such as himself, disappointed. As a matter of fact, Wallace suspects that the exceptional talent of athletes may be brought out by their apathetic and ignorant nature when it
In Theodore Isaac Rubin’s essay, “Competition and Happiness”, he summits about how in today’s society its always the battle eat or be eaten. Therefore our parents always tried to get us involved at an early age to help with our self-development, well being, and health. Since our culture has made us believe that competition brings out the best of us. Yet, it simultaneously brings out a stressful, isolating, and paranoid ambiance at a very young age. I agree with Rubin’s notion since the use of our time and energy is determined by competition and limits our happiness because it weakens our sense of identity.
Through the same process, tension generated by the desire to win in a poker game is relieved by successfully dealing one 's self four aces, or when the cult of success has truly flowered, by sagaciously shuffling the cards in a game of solitaire. The faint twinge of uneasiness in the last instance and the surreptitious nature of public delicts indicate clearly that the institutional rules of the game are known to those who evade them. But cultural (or idiosyncratic) exaggeration of the success-goal leads men to withdraw emotional support from the
In the moment neither of these feelings are amazing but in “Competition Makes a Comeback”, Caitlin Snaring shares that this was actually results in an outcome that is well worth it: “‘Losing made me want to win even more… got me fired up’ to win the 2007 contest.” (Kronholz 18). Because Caitlin felt upset after being eliminated at a 2006 geography bee, she realized that she didn’t want to feel like this again, and the only way for that to happen is to push even harder to reach goals. Without failure against others people assume they are the best or they are just a natural winner so they don’t need to try. This mindset automatically sets society up for failure, because with everyone just sitting back waiting for a trophy to be handed to them for anything and everything nothing would get done, and there is no way for everyone in a society to all win one way. Just imagine a computer engineer thinking they can release a computer that is only a small percent finished just because people loved their last
In Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, he analyzes the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian hockey players are born in the first few months of the year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, how the Beatles became one of the most successful musical acts, and how cultural legacy plays a large part in society. On the back of the book, David Leonhardt explains, “In understanding successful people, we have come to focus far too much on their intelligence and ambition and personality traits. Instead Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers, we should look at the world that surrounds the successful – their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.” Besides telling the stories of the many successors, he gives adv...
Sports play a large part of an athletic student’s life, weighing heavily on one’s identity. In his essay, “Cut”, Bob Greene relays how he and several others are cut from their middle school sports team because “[they weren’t] good enough” (Greene 58). Because of this cut, Greene and his peers end up pushing harder than ever in other areas of their life. He notes, “an inordinately large proportion of successful men share… the memory
What the majority of people think of success and fame as distinctive qualities that are only attributed to a specific group of “special people”, turned out to be inaccurate. It is as Watt considers it a common sense myth that we embrace. Therefore, the only unequivocal explanation of the outstanding outcome of thousands of nowadays trends is based on a process of social contagion of small influential or “special” group of people.
“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” is a quote by Grantland Rice which suggests that winning is not important as long as one tries their best. In the movies “Chariots of Fire” and “Next Goal Wins”, the notion and meaning of sport is explored in both similar and dissimilar ways. Although “Chariots of Fire” and “Next Goal Wins” both follow the journey of sport and competition, the characters in the respective films show contradicting views on the idea that winning or losing sport is unimportant in light of the best effort.
Therefore the ambition and desire is both a want and a need, it brings peace and comfort but also invades our decision making to figure out the fastest way to meet our goal, which in effect can harm family, friends, and one’s self without guilt.
Nearly everyone has the desire to be successful in their lives, whether it be measured in the amount of wealth a man owns or the accomplishments he has made in his life. Therein lies the most common, the success in a man's profession. There are multiple approaches to this connotation of success where a wide range of techniques can be applied. One might think that the only way to reach a particular level of success is to take on a competitive nature and achieve that coveted position of number 1. However, being competitive does not necessarily insure that a person is ‘successful.’ They must be competent in their field to reach the top spot. An example of these two sides can be found within Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman using the characters Willy and Bernard.
Often times, humans do not realize how great of an impact their desires are for ambition until they see the outcome of it. The phrase, “you gain some, you lose some” strictly attacks how one’s
celebrity may be found in the words of one of America’s Founding Fathers, John Adams, who wrote, ‘‘The rewards . . . in this life are steem and admiration of others—the punishments are neglect and contempt. The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger—and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe as a pain.” (Price, 463). The author suggests that fame is not at all w...
Williams, R. (2012, August 4). Why Do We Have an Obsession with Winning?. Psychology Today, Wired for Success,
Sports stars exhibit their talent through winning and ranking. However, through success, many values are taught. Values such as personal responsibility, integrity and respect for one’s self and others are replaced with greed, selfishness and the ‘I win-you lose’ mentality. It is sad to think that sport and brilliant sport stars will become emblems of greed and selfishness.
...ere is no competition, our minds would remain idle. Competition also helps us to get back on our feet. There can be no failure without competition and not all failure is bad. Learning from failure and overcoming it also helps us with future hurdles in life. Although we might be setback by many obstacles on the way to achieving what we want, we should not brood over such minor matters. Instead, we should find out where we wrong and change for the better. We should not be stubborn and try to do things our way but search for alternative methods that will help us to obtain success. Competition may also do good for our character and personality. An over-confident person may keep doing things his or her way in hope of getting what they want. However, after experiencing many disappointing failures, this proud and narrow-minded person may be humbled in the process of attempting to reach his or her goal.