You know success really is relative. The more successful you are, the more relatives you have! Wahahahahaa...
Okok... lame joke but success really is relative. Depending on how good one is, success can mean very different things. For example, football clubs. Big clubs like Real Madrid, AC Milan and Manchester United will only call a season successful if they win the league. Some smaller clubs might consider winning any trophy a good season. And then you have the just promoted clubs who consider not getting relegated a successful season (there's clubs that have been years in the EPL who still consider that a success too actually). Note here that in just ONE league (EPL for example), you can only have ONE winner but MULTIPLE successful clubs. Clearly winning isn't everything. More to home, students also find success in different scenarios. The top students would consider getting second not great while you have some students who are happy to just pass all their exams. Some will moan and cry all day if they get a B in SPM but others will go out and celebrate if they scrape passes.
The situation with success is not isolated. Even things that we can measure can the relative. Take distance between 2 places for example. In KL, I find travelling for 30 minutes to reach any destination to be quite normal but if I have to travel that long to reach somewhere within Penang island, that's far! Some consider having a shop 1 block away to be nearby while others might define 'nearby' as being further away.
The same with time. How often we've heard people say they'll be there 'in a while'. Or 'I'll be right back'. How does anyone define a while or when is it coming 'right back'? According to Dictionary.com, a while is define as 'a period or interval of time' but it doesn't
define the period. So to someone a while could be about 5 minutes but to others it could be up to half an hour.
And that's not the end of it. We have set seconds to be the standard for measuring time. And yet, it doesn't make time any less of a relative measurement. In the world of IT, a second is too long while a second in the cooking world too short. Therefore we can do 2 things with the same amount of time but one activity is describe as taking a long time while the other is said to take only a short amount of time. Similarly, when anyone says 'I'll see you soon', the 'soon' can be interpreted to be any amount of time. Weird, huh?
The weirdness continues with distance. Meter is the standard length measuring unit. However, a car salesman's description of 'short' is longer than a computer tech's description of 'long'. Now, we all know that anything called long should be longer anything short but because both speakers are talking about different objects, that's how we end up with such an interesting conundrum.
In the Guinness Book of World records, we have records of both the tallest
man and the tallest
tower but do realise that both records have different
measurements.
Other good examples of how relative measurements can be are such as:
- a cable line having low current is somewhere along the line of 10s of Ampere but even 1 Ampere is too much for computer circuitry.
- a man running at 36 kph (about 10 m/s) is considered fast but driving a car at that speed is considered rather slow.
- carrying a 10 kg bag is heavy and yet the average adult is considered light if he/she weighs less than 40 kg.
- normal speaking volume differs from one person to another.
In short, we may have standardize the units of measurement but we have yet to standardize our definition of those measurements. Science has help us
define them but in no ways does it create a
universal definition for what is actually long, short, fast, slow, far, near, loud or soft. So the next time someone says he'll be back in a while... time him.
