Success?

I often find myself disagreeing with the cultural American definition of success-you work as hard as you can to get as high up on the success ladder as possible, and if you knock someone down a few rungs on the way, it's ok. Our culture places too much of an emphasis on perfection, and this is what success has become known as. People think that in order to be successful, you can never mess up. You can't make a mistake. This is a dangerous mentality to have.
I want to be a doctor when I grow up. If I were to believe this mentality about success equaling perfection, I might not ever reach my goal because I would get so caught up in getting every little thing right that I would lose focus of the bigger picture. While it is important to focus on the small tasks at hand, one should also take into consideration how they fit into the bigger picture.
If you were to have this mentality while you were trying to reach your big, top-of-the-ladder goals of success, you would get stuck on your way up because failure is inevitable. You're going to mess up at some point in life, and when you do, you can't become discouraged about it and give up.