The slide changes and the co-ordinator asks us to research two entrepreneurs and to think about the mind set they possess, how it enables them to realise their success. The examples we are given are Alan Sugar and Richard Branson, one makes a virgin lifestyle look appealing and the other’s Richard Branson. It has already been assumed that our consensus understanding of success correlates with personal wealth because that’s what success means.

I am being deliberately contrary for the benefit of the point, but recently I have been in different situations predicated on this understanding as a universal goal. Moving on up, time to break free. In my humble estimation, success resides in a congruence between how I feel inside and how I behave outside. Success is subjective and sometimes independent labour is concealed.

Fast forward a couple of hours and I am discussing this with a friend. It is a familiar conversation,whereby an insidious pressure to consistently mediate experience through social media has made them loose connection with themselves. A preconceived need to adhere to the idea that success constitutes popularity in a vampiric/high school sense has brought about complete alienation and the kind of carnal competition reserved for Zoo Quest.

I am not being sour grapes here, there is success in acclaim and there is stability in finance. I just resist the idea that this very visible quantifiable, redeemable, wearable trimmed beard of success is more or less remarkable than waking up in the morning and swimming in the hot mixture. Ambition after all, is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

– The Aphex Twink