Recently, to measure how successful a person is, while some base their income as the main measurement, some use the contribution to society they make instead. However, I believe that someone’s success should be evaluated mainly based on how much people devote themselves to society.
On the one hand, people nowadays use tangible assets to evaluate others. Their concepts of success seem quite materialistic: earning a handsome income, driving nice cars, living in big houses and putting on fancy clothes. This is also a misconception created by the modern media, which usually depicts successful people as ones with a great number of monetary assets. Just based on how wealthy their appearance and belongings are, these people can usually receive privileges automatically given by people around them, making them even more outstanding than they actually are. As a result, if the money they can earn is higher and more lucrative, people will immediately assume that those individuals are more successful.
On the other hand, I still believe that the key way to measure success is to look at their valuable contributions to the society they live in. The values that workers like scientists and teachers could offer in fact have more significant and long-lasting impacts on society than just money. For example, the legacy of scientists left to human beings, such as new scientific findings, can save millions of lives. Besides, teachers are the ones who are responsible for educating the next generations of humans. Whether these latter generations can become useful to the world and contribute to the well-being of the future world or destroy the earth with their unethical wrongdoings all depends on how well the teachers do their job. From those, it is obvious to see the long-lasting effects of these careers, which would be the significant elements to see how successful they and their society are.
In general, people could use either possessions and income they own or their devotion to identify the success of others. However, from my perspective, the scale of contribution to society could be the best measurement of others’ success.