How would you define success | Why should you work hard | Career Talks with Sawan Kumar

If you want to know how to define success on your own terms — not someone else's — start with a simple measurement: the distance between where you are today and where you want to land.

Direct answer: Success is the gap you cross between your current position and your desired destination, whether that destination is money, power, respect, recognition, or happiness. The definition is personal, but the bridge across is universal — hard work, commitment, perseverance, passion, and discipline are the only tools that move you from one side to the other.

Why success means something different to every person

When I ask a room full of people what success means, the answers come back in fragments — having a lot of money, winning at something, earning recognition, holding power, being respected, feeling happiness. Every person paints a different picture, and that is exactly how it should be. Your version belongs to you. Mine belongs to me. There is no single template, and anyone who sells you one is selling you their dream, not yours.

What stays constant is the geometry. You are standing at point A. You want to reach point B. The line between those two points is built from the same raw material for every human being who has ever achieved anything — effort, consistency, and the refusal to quit when it gets ugly. That is the only honest answer to how to define success.

The PS5 lesson — wanting something because someone else has it

Yesterday my son asked me for a PS5. I asked him why. His answer was the answer most of us give without realising — "because somebody else has it." That is the single most expensive sentence a person can speak. You cannot get something just because another person has it. You can only get it by doing what they did, or something equivalent, to earn it.

So I gave him a deal. If he wanted the PS5, he had to do daily pieces of writing for me. He had to do storytelling. He had to put in real work in exchange for the thing he wanted. That is not punishment — that is the first economics lesson a child ever needs. Wanting is free. Owning costs effort.

Life is not fair, and that fact is the lesson

Look at the raw numbers. Millions of students apply for IIT every year. A few thousand get in. Millions want to become doctors. A much smaller fraction actually applies. A smaller fraction of that fraction passes. The Chartered Accountancy route — which I walked myself — has the same brutal funnel. Lots of registrations at the start of the year, a thin sliver of qualified CAs at the end of it.

Is that fair? No. Should everyone who wants to become a doctor get to become a doctor? Probably, in some perfect universe. But we do not live there. Life was never built to be fair, and waiting for it to become fair is the most efficient way to waste a decade. The faster you accept the funnel, the faster you start preparing for the narrow end of it.

Earn it — the only word that matters

You will not get what you want simply because you want it. You will get it because you earned it. That word — earn — is the entire game. You might receive things temporarily because you are someone's son, sister, brother, or favourite. That handout has a shelf life. It expires the moment the giver is no longer in the room. Once they are gone, nobody hands you anything for free again.

If your father offers to gift you a bike, the strongest answer you can give is this — "Thank you, but I want to earn it first. When I earn it, then maybe I will accept it as a gift." That single sentence rewires your relationship with effort. It moves you out of the receiver column and into the builder column. After training more than 79,000 students across 74-plus courses on AI, GoHighLevel, Canva, and business systems from my base in Dubai, I can tell you with certainty — the students who earn their seat in the room learn ten times faster than the ones whose seats were paid for.

Make your life difficult — on purpose

If your life is easy because you were born into ease, you are not living. You are coasting. Coasting feels great for a while and then it quietly turns you into a weak person. Not in a moral sense — in a structural sense. Your decision-making muscle atrophies. Your problem-solving muscle atrophies. The first real shock in life knocks you flat because you never trained for it.

This does not mean manufacture suffering. It does not mean go broke on purpose, or skip meals to prove a point. It means deliberately taking on the kind of difficulty that makes you grow — a harder course, a bigger client, a tougher fitness goal, a public commitment that forces you to keep your word. You step into the difficulty, you cross it, and on the other side you are a level above where you started. That, repeated for years, is what people later call success.

Duties before rights

One pattern I notice often, especially with younger people — they list their rights loudly and their duties quietly. They want recognition, salary, respect, freedom. Fair enough. But before you walk in and demand any of those, ask yourself one question — am I doing enough on the duty side of the ledger to justify the ask?

This is not about being submissive or grateful for scraps. It is about credibility. The people who get what they want consistently are the people who built up a quiet bank balance of delivered duties before they made any withdrawal in the form of a request. Show up early. Finish what you started. Honour the boring promises. Then ask for the bike, the PS5, the promotion, the partnership — whatever your version of the dream looks like.

The closing test

So here is the test. Look at the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Now look at what you did today to shorten that gap by even one millimetre. If the answer is nothing, your definition is still abstract — it has not yet entered your calendar. Pick one specific action you will take in the next twenty-four hours — write the first page of the book, send the cold email you have been delaying, finish the course module, do the workout. Track it. Repeat tomorrow. That is how to define success in a way that actually compounds.