ding.

“I want to put a ding in the universe.”

That’s my gchat status for the day. It seems that the departure of Steve Jobs has caused quite a stir in the market, the tech world, the business world, the world in general. He had once said he wanted to put a ding in the universe. It would seem that he did.

I’m not a fervent fan of Steve Jobs like many others. (personally I like Bill Gates better for his philanthropic work, not that either of them would care). I was, however, very touched by his commencement address at Stanford in 2005. He spoke of his triumphs and his failures, both of which people found inspirational. Well, that is really a lie, because if he had just failed, he would not have been invited to speak that day, we would not be here wallowing about “the end of an era,” and we certainly would not be talking about how inspirational he is. As much as people like to talk about their failures and how “it’s ok to fail,” it’s really only ok to fail if you can get up and succeed afterwards.

Ah, but for you to succeed, you have to first figure out what success is. I read this great article today and found this quote by Liz Strauss: “It’s not possible for the world to hold a meeting to decide your value. That decision is all yours.” Much easier said than done. For many, we’ve let others define success for us for most of our lives, achieving one goal after another, and one day we stop to look ahead, and realize that we really haven’t made a ding in the universe. The scary thing is, we may never will.

We are not all geniuses. We can’t all build a revoluntionary product or company like the Macintosh or Facebook. We are not all saints. We may not want to live in the jungle protecting endangered species or brave the war zone to save the children. Most of us are going live completely ordinary lives, without wiki pages dedicated to us. So it’s ok to define your success as just making it to a manager level, or find value in making the perfect home for your family. You just have to make sure that decision was all yours, and not what you figure would make the world think better of you. You just have to have tried your best, not only enough to not fail in other people’s eyes.

Of the graduation ceremonies I’ve attended as a participant, it’s sad to say the only commencement speech I remember was from high school, and the only thing I remember from it was our class president’s opening joke about standing in line for Star Wars. But thanks to Youtube I’ve been able to listen to a few that were truly inspiring. J.K. Rowling gave a speech at Harvard in 2008, where she said something about failure that was very similar to the quote I shared earlier about success. “Ultimately,” she said, “we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it.” She classified her failure as epic, and the world has now crowned her one of the most successful people it’s ever seen. For every J.K. Rowling in the world, there are hundreds of aspiring writers whose names we will never know. Who failed epically and did not manage to get up. For every college drop out that started a multi-billion dollar company, thousands more struggle just to survive. So yes, it’s ok to fail, and it’s ok to be afraid to fail. As long as that fear makes you try harder and dig deeper and in the end, motivates you to succeed.