A Socrates story of Success

This is how the story starts, the story of the secret of success…….

Once upon a time there lived a young man, who wanted to know “THE SECRET” of success. He used to travel long distance in search of it, meeting all the intelligent people around the known world of his times. After his many failed attempts, he looks for the most intelligent person on the earth, the one who can for sure give him the “THE SECRET”. He goes on a voyage to meet this person who will give what he was desperately looking for.

This young man meeting Socrates asks for the “THE SECRET” of success. Socrates told the young man to meet him near the river the next morning.

This young man, who was longing for such a moment to come, waits eagerly for this intelligent man by the river next morning.

Socrates asked the young man to walk with him into the river. When the water got up to their neck, Socrates took the young man by surprise and swiftly ducked him into the water.

The boy struggled to get out but Socrates was strong and kept him there until the young man started turning blue. Socrates pulled the young man's head out of the water and the first thing the young man did was to gasp and take a deep breath of air.

Socrates asked him, "What did you want the most when you were there?" the boy replied, "Air." Socrates said, "That is the secret of success! When you want success as badly as you wanted the air, then you will get it. There is no other secret."

There’s no other secret…….

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Boring is best

Quibblers will, of course, find more holes in all this than there are in a chunk of Swiss cheese. The Economist ranked Switzerland as the best country to be born, as per their survey in 2013. America was helped to the top spot back in 1988 by the inclusion in the ranking of a “philistine factor” (for cultural poverty) and a “yawn index” (the degree to which a country might, despite all its virtues, be irredeemably boring). Switzerland scored terribly on both counts. In the film “The Third Man”, Orson Welles’s character, the rogue Harry Lime, famously says that “Italy for 30 years had war, terror and murder under the Borgias but in that time produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance; Switzerland had 500 years of peace and democracy—and produced the cuckoo clock”.

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