How Society Measures Worth

By Steve Wang

People usually want to be successful in life but do they want to be successful by their own definition or societies definition? To help those that want to be successful by societies definition, an online survey was conducted to find out.

The online survery was hosted on Google Forms. Here is the link to the form. In english, the main question is: “What 3 factors do you think a person needs to have to become successful?” and in Chinese it is: “你覺得一個成功的人要具備哪三個條件?”. Before the main question, users were required to fill in their gender and their age.

The results show that personal qualities is the most important for measuring success. That is followed by ability, relationships and family, money and finance, education and knowledge, values and ethics, appearance and image. This results was different from what was initially predicted. It was thought that the most important factors would be money and finance followed by appearance and image because, when people think of a successful person, they are usually rich and famous. For example, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. Contrary to the initial prediction, those very unimportant when people measure someone's success. People thought that having personal qualities were significantly more important than all the other things. This might suggest that people view people who they know more personally as more successful compared to some rich and famous personal they do not know. Another reason might be, people bringing their own biases in when answering this question.

An interesting part of the results is that it coincide with the results of an experiment about measuring someone's values with the same category types (Wang, 2023). In that experiment, personal qualities was also the most important factor but to a lesser degree. This is noteworthy because it seems like personal qualities are very important to people. This might be because one will not consider anther successful if one does not like them. The data, also leads this researcher to think that people usually think and follow about their own definition of success. This is apparent when the most chosen category was personal qualities.

In conclusion, to be successful according to society, you have to have “good” personal qualities, have many abilites, and have good relationship skills. If you have all of that, the general public will view you as successful. This research also shows that you do not need to go after publicity, fame, or money to be considered successful.