Is the struggle endured to achieve success more important than the accomplishment itself?

Success, by itself, has many forms. It can mean buying a house, getting the desired test score, or getting a dream job, all of which have with them meaning. Without meaning, success is just another event that we go through. And the meaning, the one that defines success, is the struggle that one painfully goes through to achieve it.

The life of the fictional Harry Potter can be a perfect example. All of us who has read the book or seen the movie know what harry had gone through to get rid of Voldemort. He lost his parents, his friends and almost all of those he held close to him. That was his struggle. That is what gave the book the audience that it never thought it would get. He went through thick and thin, he faced everything that life threw at him, but despite all of that he succeeded. His struggle is what made his success that much significant. It was what gave meaning to it.

My dad’s life can also be a testament to this. During the 1980’s Ethiopian revolution, the dictator-led government made sure to kill all who stood against it. My dad and his friends fled from their home town, like every other make adult and played a major role like supplying arms to the rebels to take down the regime. Almost 600,000 people died during the revolution, including some of his relatives. But the success they achieved, a bitter-sweet one, would have meant nothing without the sacrifice all those people paid in order to have a better life for them and everybody else.

Both of these examples stand to show that success is meaningless without struggle, without sacrifice. Success isn’t something that can be given form a parent tot a child, but something that is earned through painful and sometimes fatal sacrifice. Success really is defined by the obstacle which one has overcome while trying to succeed.