Secrets to success

I had always believed in quotes like these – “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure. – Colin Powell”. I believed in such quotes when I was younger and more innocent. Not anymore. Now I understand that neither is success directly proportional to hard work nor is hard work sufficient for success. What you need is working smartly, being smart and knowing how to manipulate other people.

I, sometimes look at others who hardly put any effort in life, enjoying the fruits that anyone who does a lot of hard work should have enjoyed. They copied assignments, projects, never spent a night working on assignments and instead went to parties. Some nerd like me provided them with assignments to copy. They copied answers from another nerd like me in exams. (But I never showed answers in any exam). That nerd is even now slogging day and night at work and some smart person is taking credit for all the work he/she did. I know life is unfair and networking with others mostly helps in everything. Right from popularity in online to offline world. Nobody cares if they cannot write a single line of code decently. As long as you can show off, show that you are great, you are considered a genius. You need to show that you have accomplished some things, nobody cares if you copy pasted it from a website or are taking credit for something your teammate did.

I remember there was this guy I knew who pretended to help me in my project. I had done 99% of the work already and was very well capable of completing it on my own. He just read some article on the net and implemented steps given there. I could have done the same. But then because of all the drama that he did about “helping” me, people started thinking he was hard-working and that he had contributed to my project in a significant way – to the extent that they thought I could not have completed the project without his help. All that he wanted was to copy my code and that was the reason for all this drama. I understood that much later. Even today when my friends say he is “hard-working”, my blood boils. I feel like jumping from the tallest building. If he is hard-working, then what kind of species do people like me belong to?!

I have also noticed that people like me never get anything in life, without first struggling for it. We struggle, struggle, struggle to get something that is served to others on golden platter. And these other people never realize how difficult it is to get that something, since they never put any efforts. We, on the other hand, know the value of that one success that comes after years of struggle. I feel people who get everything easily without working towards it are the ones who are not humble and nice to others. Sometimes, I feel like telling them that they did not achieve it because they were intelligent or brilliant but because of their networking skills.

I have been meeting such people at various stages of my life. I get shocked to see such people even landing into a corporate job. They lack common sense. They lack basic knowledge because they never studied anything while in college. They just got a degree for the heck of it and because of that degree, they have a job. Not that they are qualified in terms of knowledge or intelligence. I could not believe when a person I know thought that dual-booting a Windows machine with Linux means both Linux and Windows are running simultaneously on it. Seriously?!!

So the struggle in life continues. Husband says when you know that you have to put extra efforts, why don’t you just put more efforts. And I say, what about that girl who never did a single assignment, could not write a single line of code on her own easily getting into one of the top companies? Every single person was shocked to see that. I know I deserved something better than what I have, just because I worked harder. {Not that what I currently have is not good. It is good enough for me.} It just does not work that way. Struggle, struggle, struggle. That is how it works for me. And I feel like a loser.

Rant ends.