Consider the following comments on success.
We let the world define success for us and then wonder why winning feels so empty.
A culture that measures success in one currency will quietly bankrupt everyone who counts in another.
Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.
Proverb
The ladder of success is easiest to climb when someone else is holding it steady underneath you.
Every visible triumph rests on a hundred quiet failures nobody chose to photograph.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that success is a borrowed yardstick, usually handed to us by our society before we have asked whether its measurements match what we actually want from a life. Open by conceding that shared standards are not all bad, since visible markers of achievement coordinate effort and reward genuine contribution. Then press the harder claim: when success is defined narrowly, by wealth, status or fame, it crowds out goods that cannot be ranked, and it shames everyone whose excellence is uncounted. A useful third move examines how success is sold as the fruit of individual merit while quietly resting on inherited advantage and luck. Caution: avoid the easy inversion that all worldly success is hollow, which conveniently flatters those who never risked pursuing it.