The Key to Success

Everybody dreams of success. We define it as the ultimate happiness for their whole life to

enjoy. However, success is known to be difficult to achieve because it must worth enough to

give you the pleasure for the rest of your life. Nowadays, our society focuses on the careers

that require erudition for the development of the country. To achieve those careers, we

simply believe that we need intelligence, talent, and hard work to cover all the aspects of

“success”, but that‘s not all.

Success is not only intelligence, talent, and hard work, but it involves with unique

opportunities. What we call opportunities is what others can’t have as their options to take.

But what unique opportunities does is that it separates from the other opportunities that

others had, making you special and outstanding than others. This leads you to success

because it will be your own advantage that no one has.

Successful people are often called outliers. It is a scientific term to describe things or

phenomena that lie outside normal experience. The normal experience that people have is

when they get good grades, go to good colleges, and work hard. But the outliers experience

their uniqueness throughout their lives. They have their opportunities that others don’t get,

and when those opportunities, his or her intelligence, talent, and hard work all come together

and overlap each other like a tower, the tower becomes the successful life that the person

will live.

Many examples apply. Everybody believes Bill Gates succeeded because of his intelligence.

However, that is not the only part that lead him to his present status. His unique

opportunities ? how his private school and an university nearby had a computer lab that he

could practice handling the computer without limits. He had his intelligence, his effort to

program computers for innumerable hours, and his unique opportunities that opened doors

to more chances to operate a computer back in the 1970s.

We must understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers

it is not just because of their own efforts. It’s because of the contributions of lots of different

people and lots of different circumstances? and that means that we, as a society, family,

and even a friend can have more control about who succeeds?and how many of us

succeed than we think. Everybody can be hopeful to dream of success if they catch their

opportunities at the right time.

<Sua Shin,North Hollywood Highly Gifted Magnet>