When we think of New York City, we think of a place where anyone can achieve the status of life they desire. What does it take to achieve this however, and how can we define success? There isn’t a clear-cut definition for success; therefore, everyone has their own definitions for the term. To me, success isn’t about expensive cars, lots of money, a huge house, and a family. Success to me can simply be defined as being happy with your life. German-French theologian and philosopher Albert Schweitzer once said that “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.” If you have all of these material possessions but aren’t happy with your life or yourself, then how can you truly be a successful person? To many other people however, success can be best defined as the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted. To achieve success in New York, one needs to have two qualities as a person. They have to possess either hard work or creativity, or both.
You can dream of reaching success, but to actually achieve it, you have to wake up and work hard for it. The definition of hard work, to me, is not giving up even if you’ve hit a rough patch in your road to success. New Yorkers are one of the hardest working groups of people on the face of this planet because they know what it’s like to work for something and earn it through working hard. A New Yorker who comes to mind when I think of hard work is none other than Donald Trump. When you think of Donald Trump, you think of a New York businessman who has a ton of money. But that’s not even close to the whole story about Donald Trump. In the early 90s, Mr. Trump’s debt was increasing drastically. Matter of fact, it increased so drastically that he was brought to business bankruptcy and was close to personal bankruptcy. It couldn’t get any worse than this for the New Yorker.
However, Donald Trump was able to greatly bounce back from his hardships. He started on several projects and has been successful on them as of right now. He built Trump International Hotels and Towers in major cities like Honolulu, Chicago, Toronto, and Tampa (Wikipedia). Not to mention the fact that Trump also owns a large number of property and land in New York. He was able to do this because of that one big quality New Yorkers possess; hard work. Even though he went through these hardships and conflicts in his business life, he was able to overcome them and rebound. Donald Trump is the epitome of the hard work that is the key to success anywhere, especially in New York City.
The other quality a person should possess to reach success, creativity, is also one of the quintessential things you need to survive in New York. A creative person is one who is able to create and has the ability to innovate. A creative person thinks outside the box and possesses originality, and finds new ways of getting something done. The best U.S. President of all-time Franklin D. Roosevelt once said that “Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” You can’t buy happiness with money, happiness comes from achievement, and that achievement comes from creativity. It’s that creativity and creative effort that allows people to succeed in New York.
Not everyone has the ability to think creatively and be creative, however. A person who comes to mind when I think of creativity is my English writing professor Mary Louise Penaz. Mrs. Penaz is always looking for new ways to communicate her message and preaches that creativity is the new thing now, and she’s right in my opinion. She is on a bunch of blog sites, social networks, and other websites because she’s always looking for the right opportunity to innovate and capture that something. With the Internet being so popular nowadays, there are many ways to succeed by using the Internet and Mrs. Penaz has been telling us this since the beginning of the semester.
Hard work and creativity are essential qualities a person should have in order to succeed in the big city of dreams. Without hard work and creativity, you wouldn’t be able to succeed in New York because if you don’t work hard for something, you will never be able to achieve it. If you don’t think outside the box and be an innovative person, it would be very difficult to accomplish and reach success because people are always out to compete with one another and get ahead of their competition. New York is like a business and you have to be on top of your game every day or else you won’t last very long.