success, an ever-moving goalpost. just my random thoughts on a saturday afternoon. my favorite sport is football. and by football i mean the sport that 90% of the world's population calls football. yeah, that one :). in football, there are two goalposts and two teams, with each team defending one. your aim is to prevent your opponent from scoring in yours while you try to score in theirs. the goalpost doesn't move and is always in the same position throughout the match (the teams switch goalposts every break though). so, you don't have to worry about whether the goalpost will move further, closer, or randomly leave the stadium. it's constant and always in a fixed position that you can be certain of. that was a brief description of the goalpost for people who don't watch football. i liken success to a form of goalpost. everyone in life wants to get the ball in the net and achieve something they can be remembered for. whether it requires burning the midnight candle, going to college, or learning a new skill, the ultimate desire is to get the ball in the goalpost of success and hear the loud cheers that follow it. however, there's a problem with the goalpost of success: it keeps changing. unlike soccer, where you can be 100% sure the goalpost never changes, the same can't be said of the goalpost of success. for clarity, let's take a trip down memory lane. because success differs from age to age, we are going to stick with the age range 18 to 22. we would logically assume that people within this age range are either in college or have graduated college and either working or seeking a job. so, let's go 10 years back in time. in 2015, if you were in college, the definition of success back then was to do well in school. like actually pass your classes and have a really great gpa. take the hardest classes you can and have a wonderful looking transcript. that was most people's desire back then. i am attaching a short piece here, written in 2015, that speaks of how highly gpa was held back then. a high gpa guaranteed you jobs and a whole lot of good opportunities. for more tech-savvy people, a high gpa was still the goal. internships weren't by any means as selective as they are nowadays, so getting one was quite easy. your goal was to just do well in your classes, build a few side projects, and get snapped up by a good company. fast forward to 2025 and a lot has changed. sure, gpas are still relevant, but not nearly as much as they were in 2015. in that article i attached, a 4.0 gpa was what most people desired. now, ask around and most people say "i am cool with anything above a 3.5." success in college is now shiny resumes: conferences attended, accolades, research papers authored or co-authored for aspiring researchers. internships are now the deciding factor as to whether you are a serious student in the engineering field. most tech companies don't even ask for your gpa anymore. in 2015, most students didn't even have a linkedin account. if people hear you don't have one in 2025, as a popular meme says, "you can never make it. you are using your future generation to play." if one thing is pretty clear, it's that success is an ever-changing goalpost that keeps moving around, and trying to keep up with it is a difficult task. imagine if the goalpost kept moving around in football, how difficult would it be to score? i am sure ronaldo would be stuck on 100 goals right now. so how do you overcome this? my advice is to create your own goalpost. define what success is to you and let that be what you pursue. ask yourself, "what do i really want in life?" not what people want, but what you want. obviously make sure your goalpost is still relevant in this age and time, but don't be pressured to do what everyone else is doing. i am in the computer science field, so i will give examples in that. if you are a computer science student and you know your goal isn't to work at faang but to contribute to computing in academia, then focus on that and work on actually understanding the concepts. there's a ton of math and deep stuff behind the programming languages we use that we don't even know. you can learn to solve leetcode problems, but you don't exactly need to. grad schools don't give you online assessments to find the highest number of paths in a 3x3 matrix. if your goal is to build something of your own, then work on it. internships are good for gaining experience, but would you rather spend 3 months working for someone else when you could use that time to build and scale yours? if your goal is to work at faang, you don't have to look at everyone raising seed money. just focus on yourself and grind that leetcode. there's no goal too ephemeral or too materialistic. just make your own goalpost, and when you put the ball in, celebrate it. shout "get in" and punch the air in joy. in the words of jim rohn, "success is steady progress towards one's personal goals." so, online friend, you got this! get that ball in the net. i am rooting for you! unconventional thinker,

12:30 est. p.s.: fun fact: leetcode was founded on august 7, 2015. so most folks in 2015 didn't even know what leetcode was. lucky fellas.