Have you ever wondered what success is when there are so many people who dedicate their lives to it? Is it the perfect work results or the great accuracy? Or is “to be successful”, to have a rich life, or to be honored by many people? So, take a few minutes to think deeply, life will show you there are people who reached success in an unexpectedly simple way.

Success is when father and son have enough courage to enter the kitchen and cook the food which mother likes as in the occasion of women’s day. The soup may be a little bit salty, the fist (which should be red) turns black and then when looking at the meal, mother still smiles. Because father and son couldn’t be successful in the kitchen, but they were successful when giving mother “the rose” of love. That’s a present which is more valuable than any of the most valuable gifts; the happiness is deep inside mother’s eyes.

Success is also the story about a boy with a foot illness who would never be able to walk normally again. He’s kept the dream of being a football player ever since he was very young. After many tries to exert himself, he became a reserve football player on a small football team. He’s never taken part in an official game. But that’s not a failure. Instead, the real success went to the boy, who overcame the situation with so much energy and will, to follow his childhood dream. How many people can achieve that kind of success?

Every year, after the time of university entrance examinations, there are so many candidates that get sad when failing their exams. 27/30 is such a high score. But it doesn’t make sense when the school requires 27.5. In fact, that’s still not failure, that’s just delayed-success. Life still welcomes them with others options. The most important thing is that they tried their best to affirm themselves. That’s the original meaning of contest and it’s also the substances of success.

When I was young, I read a moving story. It’s about a poor boy with an essay about mother - the one who protects your life. The boy wrote about a mother with silver hair and husky but warm hands. He concluded: Grandmother is the mother - the woman who covered him during the journey of life. The essay has digressed from the subject and needs rewriting. But that’s still a successful piece of work, because it’s filled with the love of an orphaned boy for his grand mother. Is there any success, any sentiment more sacred than that?

Many years ago, newspapers honored a poor student who entered the university with the perfect score. To him, that’s a big success. There’s another success, silent but great, which belongs to a father who drove a cycle (a transportation vehicle with 3 wheels, popular in Vietnam) for almost 20 years to raise money for his son’s study. Faith and hope were always on the father’s face, sustaining lots of misery and hard work. And the day the son entered the university is also the day his father graduated from the course-for-a-father.

I know there’s a female student who graduated from university with excellent ranking 20 years ago. With her talent, she could have achieved success on the paths of career and fame. But that student accepted to sacrifice chances of her life to become a good wife, a virtuous mother of two little princesses. Even now, when she’s a middle-aged woman, she’s still saying: “Taking good care of you and your father, to me, is a big success”. Whenever hearing that saying, I’m moved to tears. Family is the success, the beautiful work of mother, and we must thank her for that.

People always long for success, but just following it blindly is nonsense. You want to be rich or you want to be a millionaire like Bill Gates? So, please fold your money carefully and give it out to a beggar, homeless or poor person. With that good action, you will show not only that you’re rich in matter but also you’re rich spiritually. Therefore, you’re really a success!

You may dream that success will come to you like it does to Abramowitz - the manager of the All-star team. Success is not so far away, you just need to spend some time taking care of “the football team” of your family. There, you’ll receive unlimited love, what Abramowitz would never receive from his players. Success comes to everyone in such a sweet and simple way.

You were born — that’s a great success of your parents. Your responsibility is to keep the perfect beauty of that success. Don’t ever think life is just a sequence of failures; as a professor said: “There’s no failure, it’s just the way we spend our lives”.

And to me, success is when someone reads this small article. Maybe the score wouldn’t be high, but being able to put my own thinking to writing, to me, is a success.