 | Megan Schimpf Prescriptions |
Ignore every opinion you have about Madonna and imagine you are her.
You have just starred in a role you have fought over for years, received critical acclaim and taken home a Golden Globe. You feel you have finally succeeded.
Then, the Oscar nominations came out last week and the only major nomination you got is Best Song. Not Best Actress. Not Best Picture.
So, have you really succeeded?
It is difficult to argue that Madonna is unsuccessful. She has sold millions and millions of records worldwide, pioneered a place for women in the music industry and created - then recreated - a profile known across the globe.
But in the eyes of the film industry, she is not successful. She remains a music star.
Success is one of the most intangible goals to grasp, and challenging to define. It is difficult to attain and even more difficult to hold onto. Admissions committees, hiring committees and professors each have ways to evaluate how much we have accomplished. And so we collect letters of recommendation, honors and grade point averages and we write essay upon essay about where we see ourselves in 10 years and what motivated us to apply.
In some ways, it is accurate. Most of us have invested long hours and high stress levels to get our academic records to where they are now. To see that goal realized is satisfying.
And grade point averages are not entirely random - they do represent, to some degree, how well we performed in a majority of our classes. Over time, the "average" part should eliminate the class you just couldn't care about, or the one you just couldn't understand, no matter how hard you tried.
But in the end, numbers, letters and words do not paint a complete picture of who we are or what we have attained. Because they are not the whole picture of what it took to succeed, or what it takes to continue to be successful.
When we leave school, and enter the "real world" - whatever that may be - the ability to memorize facts or recite details is not usually a predictor for success. Thus, people with the highest grade points don't always end up with the most prestige.
At the University, we have a sense of this seeming paradox. To be accepted here, everyone had to be smart or very good at something. Everyone had an impressive high school resume. But not everyone makes it past the first year, and not everyone graduates. Including Madonna.
So there is a quality to success that has nothing to do with studying, exams or research. It has to do with perseverance, the ability to fail and start over again, strength, determination and the power to leave it all for a little while to stay sane. And the sense to determine when you are a success, even when no one else agrees.
Getting a good grade in a class might not require any of these traits. Ironically, getting a less-than-good grade might require all of them. The most educational classes tend to be the ones that confine us to long hours of studying, to attending every lecture and office hours, and to challenging our limits each time we open a book or read through notes.
And so we are left with a definition of success that is constantly changing depending on the circumstances. Everyone, in truth, has their own way of defining when we have succeeded - it is when we sit back and think we have done exactly what we wanted to do, and done it well. It is when we finally stop and take a deep breath for a moment before tackling the next goal.
While graduating from college is a step toward later success, it is not complete. It is not enough to forget the lessons college has taught us, beyond exams, facts, equations and essays. Strength, determination, perseverance and grace in the face of failure are just as important off campus as they are on.
The problems, readings and experiments that have determined grade point averages over the years will be only slightly applicable in the future. When students complain that school teaches no real-world applications, teachers say they are teaching thought patterns and problem-solving skills.
What they are really teaching is success. That is what we should absorb from the professors who are teaching us: how to think, how to love what you do enough to give it to someone else and how to succeed. At that point, we can sit back and know we have found that something called success, and done it well.
Better than Madonna, even.
- Megan Schimpf can be reached over e-mail at mschimpf@umich.edu