What is Success? suc·cess səkˈses/ noun the accomplishment of an aim or purpose
It has always been said that nothing worth having comes easy. Chris McCandless, the protagonist of Jon Krakauer’s novel, Into the Wild, learned that sometimes being successful costs everything, including life itself. Chris was a young adventurer who loved to explore the world and all of the beauty it had to offer. In April of 1992, he went on his final journey, poorly equipped and directed, into the Alaskan wilderness. As far as readers know, Chris was not even headed in a particular direction; he was just wandering into the wild. In the short life that Chris lived, many people would argue that he was not successful because his mission in Alaska had failed. On the contrary, his great experiences and relationships with others support that Chris was a very successful young man. Although the diverse texts support many different ideas of how true success is defined, they also prove that success has more than one single definition. Chris had mentioned throughout the novel that he was distant with his family and had not made much effort to reach out to them while he was away. Jon Krakauer related to Chris because they both had unstable relationships with their fathers. Krakauer tells the reader, “My father’s
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Deep Survival, an excerpt from a novel by Laurence Gonzales, takes the reader through the steps of what survivors do to stay alive and out of trouble. Step five states, Celebrate your successes (take joy in completing tasks), which is meant to help the survivors from falling into hopelessness. Survivors are supposed to take a lot of pride in every success that they have in order to keep them motivated to perform other necessary tasks (Gonzales). This step to survival is how Richard Pine stayed alive for as long as he did, because he took joy in his smallest successes, even something as simple as eating