Chapter 2: Measuring Success by What We Overcome

The Words: Booker T. Washington, 1901

In 1901, Booker T. Washington published the story of his life, Up From Slavery. In its second chapter, looking back on his boyhood, he writes that he has learned that success should be measured "not so much by the position that one has reached in life" as by the obstacles a person has overcome while trying to succeed. In my own words: do not judge a life only by how high it stands, but by how far it has climbed. Two people may reach the same place, but if one began at the bottom of a deep valley, that person's journey says more about courage and effort.

The Life Behind the Words

Washington was born into slavery in 1856. As a small boy he owned nothing, could not read and had no chance to go to school. After slavery ended, while he was still a child, he worked long hours, first at a furnace where salt was made and later in a coal mine. He wanted so much to learn that his mother found him an old spelling book, and he began to teach himself the letters. As a young man he travelled a long way, much of it on foot, to reach a school where poor students could work to pay for their studies.

At that school, his first test was not an examination on paper. He was asked to clean a classroom, and he swept and dusted it again and again until no dirt remained. He was accepted. Some years later, in 1881, he was chosen to lead a new school for Black students that began with almost nothing: a few students and very poor buildings. Under his care it grew into a large college, and the students themselves made bricks and put up many of its buildings. His words about obstacles were not a theory. They were the shape of his own road.

What the Words Ask of Us

Washington's words ask us to change the way we look at success, in other people and in ourselves. The world often looks only at the finish line: the title, the salary, the size of the house. But two people at the same finish line may have run very different races. One had help at every step. The other had to clear stones from the path while running. Washington asks us to honour the clearing of the stones. This view is also kinder, because it lets us see value in lives that the world does not notice.

Picture a woman named Grace who is sixty-three and has decided to learn to swim. Her grandchildren swim easily, almost without thinking. For Grace, each lesson begins with a fear of water that she has carried since she was a girl. After two months, she can swim one slow length of the pool. By the world's measure, it is nothing special. By Washington's measure, it is a real success, because of everything she had to move past to reach the other end.

Similar Words From Around the World

A traditional saying in Japanese puts this idea into a few short words: fall down seven times, get up eight. The saying does not promise that we will never fall. It almost expects that we will, again and again. What it counts is the getting up, one more time than the falling. This echo agrees with Washington, and it adds a gentle detail. The obstacles are not only outside us, on the road. Sometimes the obstacle is our own fall, and success means rising from it.

In the Analects (9.28), Confucius makes an observation from nature. In my own words: only when the year turns cold do we see that the pine and the cypress are the last to lose their leaves. In warm weather, all trees look green and strong. Winter shows which ones are truly hardy. The echo reminds us that hard times reveal a strength that easy times hide. Washington might have said the same about his students: their difficulties did not make them weaker, but showed what they were made of.

Living It Today

These words can help in many lives. A young person who did not get into the school they hoped for can still count how much they learned on the way. A worker who changes careers at forty can be proud of the courage it takes to start again. Someone recovering from an illness can count each step regained. Parents and teachers can praise children not only for top marks, but also for the hard subject they kept on trying.

Here is something to try this week. Write down one thing in your life that you are quietly proud of. Next to it, do not write how impressive it looks. Write instead what you had to overcome to reach it: the fear, the lack of time or money, the doubts. Read the list slowly. You may find that your life holds more success than you thought, measured in the way Washington measured it.

Chapter 3: Living Calmly in Any Situation

The Words: Masaoka Shiki, 1902

In 1902, a poet lay in bed writing a short piece each day for a newspaper. The column was called A Six-Foot Sickbed, after the narrow bed from which he could no longer rise. In the entry for 2 June 1902, Masaoka Shiki made a quiet confession. In my own words, he says: until now I misunderstood what Zen Buddhism calls enlightenment. I thought it meant being able to die calmly in any situation. That was a mistake. Enlightenment means being able to live calmly in any situation. He was in great pain and near the end of his life, and he turned his attention not to death but to living.

The Life Behind the Words

Shiki was born in 1867 and grew up in a time of fast change. He loved poetry, and he also loved games and sport, especially the new game of baseball, which he played as a young man. While still young, he fell ill with tuberculosis, a disease of the lungs that was common and very dangerous then. Even so, he became one of the great renewers of two forms of short poetry in Japanese: the haiku, a very short poem of three lines, and the tanka, a short poem of five lines. He asked poets to look closely at real things and describe what they saw, simply and freshly, instead of repeating old, worn images.

In his last years the illness spread to his spine, and for long periods he could not leave his bed. Friends and students came to visit, and his mother and his sister cared for him. From his bed he kept writing, and he also painted small pictures of flowers and fruit in watercolours. The column continued until shortly before he died, in September 1902, at the age of thirty-four. The words about living calmly come from this narrow world: a bed, a small garden seen from the room, and a mind that would not stop noticing.

What the Words Ask of Us

Shiki's words turn a familiar idea upside down. Many traditions admire the person who can face death without fear. Shiki does not say this is wrong, but it is not the whole point. The harder and more useful skill is to live calmly whatever happens: in pain, in boredom, in disappointment, on ordinary days that do not go as we wish. Calm here does not mean feeling nothing. Shiki wrote honestly about his pain, and also with humour. It means continuing to live fully, with attention, inside whatever situation we are given.

Think of a nurse named Leila coming home after a long night shift. Her plans for the morning are spoiled: the bus is late, it is raining and her shoes are wet. She could spend the whole ride angry at the morning. Instead she notices the rain on the window and thinks of the tea she will make at home. Nothing about the situation has changed. But she has chosen to live inside it calmly, instead of waiting for a better morning before she begins to live.

Similar Words From Around the World

In the 1580s, the writer Michel de Montaigne, who wrote in French, described his own way of living in one of his last essays, "Of Experience" (Essays 3.13). In my own words: when I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. He adds that when his thoughts wander during a walk alone in a beautiful orchard, he brings them back to the walk, to the orchard and to himself. Like Shiki, Montaigne finds wisdom not in some faraway state but in being fully present in what we are doing. His echo is lighter and more cheerful, but it points to the same calm.

Some eighty years before Shiki, the poet Kobayashi Issa, who also wrote haiku in Japanese, lost his little daughter. In 1819 he wrote a haiku that says, in my own words: this world of dew is a world of dew, and yet, and yet. A drop of dew lasts only one morning, and old teachings say that our lives are like that. Issa accepts this, but he does not pretend that acceptance takes away his love and grief. The words "and yet" hold both. This echo reminds us that living calmly is not the same as being cold. A calm heart can still be a full heart.

Living It Today

Shiki's words can help in many kinds of lives. Someone with a long illness can look for one thing to enjoy today, as Shiki did with his flowers and paints. Someone caring for a family member can find small moments of peace inside a tiring day. A student waiting for exam results, or a worker waiting for news about a job, can stop putting life on hold. Calm living does not wait for perfect conditions. It begins inside the conditions we have.

Here is something to try today. When something goes wrong, even something small, pause and ask yourself one quiet question: how can I live this moment well, just as it is? Then find one real thing near you and look at it closely, as Shiki looked at his garden: a plant, a sound, a taste, a face. A poet in a narrow bed found a whole world to write about. Our own day, however ordinary, has room for the same calm and the same delight.