Barbara Ehrenreich: Striving To See Your Own Success

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Striving To See Your Own Success Success is the strive for consistent greatness it is what we all are thirsty for. It also means to achieve any goals or dreams that you have in life. To be successful in anything requires a lot of hard work and dedication. To many, success seems to come suddenly. When you observe others and what they have achieved you usually don’t appreciate what it has taken for them to get where they are. Ultimately, in failing to do this you also fail to learn what it would take for you to attain the same level of achievement and success. Perhaps the most gratifying measure of success is knowing you made it through another week working two or more unglamorous jobs and you were able to pay your some of your bills with…show more content…
Ehrenreich vividly describes the emotional and physical impacts of a less sophisticated standard of management as well as the living and working conditions of that lifestyle. Ehrenreich is an author and journalist. She begins a low wage experiment in Key West Florida. She starts by getting a job as a waitress at a restaurant and a housekeeper at a hotel. She is doing this experiment to prove that if you don’t receive a college degree you would have to be subjected to working two or three jobs just to make ends meet. She is overworked and under paid and barely gets to take a break. “The break room summarizes the whole situation: there is none, because there are no breaks at Jerry’s” (Ehrenreich 291). she starts to get to know her co-workers and Barbara soon realizes that they don’t want to advance in life they just want to work enough just to get by. She discusses that her living arrangements have become a little extreme. The bathroom is so small my knees rub against the shower stall when I sit on the toilet, and you can’t just leap out of bed you have to climb down to the foot of it in order to find a patch of floor space to stand on (Ehrenreich 297). Ehrenreich states that minimum wage jobs are not “financially viable.” After her conclusion Ehrenreich condems her and her co-workers lifestyle to the bottom shelf of our job market with a slim…show more content…
Realizing what is truly important to us is a major step towards achieving personal success. Once a person fully knows who they are, they are able to see limitations and opportunities. Personal success is being able to allow for personal growth. Success can mean having a family, friends, and a mediocre paying job that satisfies. It is important to keep a balance of the important things in one’s life otherwise, weaknesses can be developed that shadows over a person’s natural strength to prioritize. A balance of the important things in one’s life is what allows personal success to be achieved. Successfulness is the ability to seize new opportunities and explore new paths in life. Balance is the key to success because when there is balance in one’s life there is a cut back of stress, which makes room for the ability to thrive; and a person’s ability to thrive is what carries them to their personal success. To be successful is to understand what is important to you, to recognize your weaknesses without hiding behind them, to strive for balance as well as open new doors in life. A new door in life allows for new opportunities, which allows for personal growth, which results in ones successes in life. To be successful one must discover who they are as a person and whether or not they make decisions based on their race or on being comfortable with hard physical labor and very little

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