Relative to the world that I grew up in, the young people of today have a lot more opportunities available to them in all aspects of their lives. But I’m not sure that I would necessarily want to be in their shoes. When I was a young boy, my only distraction was soccer. I had an intense passion for playing the sport but there was one problem: my friends and I had no money to buy soccer balls so we often had nothing to play with. That allowed me to devote my meager time off from farmwork and chores to studying.

In contrast, today’s world is exceedingly noisy. Young people now have an avalanche of toys and gadgets, access to a cacophonous social media, and an endless assortment of shows on television and streaming platforms. How is anyone, let alone a child, supposed to keep their focus and be able to attend to the important things in life?

Despite my disciplined nature, I have a feeling that it wouldn’t have been easy for me to pursue my goals as methodically as I did during my childhood if I had to also contend with such a tsunami of distractions. Whenever I bring up this issue in conversations with one of my older sisters, she assures me that the children will be alright. Her argument is that they don’t see the world the way we do because this is the only one they know, and that they are quite used to it. Although she makes a good point, I still can’t help but continue to worry.

As if all that isn’t enough, young people these days are also under hyper-intense pressure to “succeed.” Increasingly, society is measuring their achievements by how elite the colleges they get into are, and the prestige of the jobs they obtain after they graduate from those universities. The competition for the few spots available has reached maddening levels, and will probably grow worse over time. In a recent column, David Brooks quoted a college senior who said to him: “We are the most rejected generation.” According to Brooks, about 54,000 people applied to the Harvard class of 2028 but just around 1,950 were admitted. He says that Goldman Sachs receives about 315,000 applications for its 2,700 summer internship positions.

Brooks goes on to say that the real rat race begins when the chosen few arrive on the campuses of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford and the other elite colleges. There, they enter into even fiercer competitions for acceptance into exclusive student clubs, selective classes, and elite majors. And then, they immediately begin the next battle for placements at prestigious firms in the banking, consulting, hedge fund, private equity, venture capital and other glamorous industries.

Having a stratospheric ambition to gain admission to elite institutions and apply for the biggest and most prestigious of jobs is something that I am quite familiar with. I was just about ten years old when I hatched a plan to seek entry to Ghana’s most exclusive secondary school, and to go from there to either Oxford or Cambridge University in England. After that, I would return to run for the presidency in Ghana—or any country that I could find. I concocted that entire scheme in a matter of minutes, as I stood in the middle of a dusty village wearing tattered clothes and with no shoes on (every child walked barefoot in that place because parents couldn’t afford shoes).

Clearly, I wasn’t Oxbridge material. But I didn’t know it.

The problem for the young people of today is that they are fully aware of the daunting nature of the task ahead of them right from the get-go. Also, the intense competition they are subjected to takes place under the full glare of lights. If they don’t make it, everyone hears about it. That public scrutiny is perhaps the thing that most of our youngsters, and quite often their parents, are most apprehensive about.

I had a couple of major advantages. No one in my village, including my own parents, knew that I had entered some race. Everyone there was illiterate so they wouldn’t have understood what the whole thing was about anyway. Also, my rivals were all in distant parts of the country. I was therefore somewhat insulated. In a typical American high school, oftentimes there are several students in a class who are trying to get into the same elite colleges. The competition therefore tends to be up close and personal.

I had some great successes along the way, but they were accompanied by massive disappointments. Attending Oxbridge, and the presidency thing, are among the fantasies that didn’t pan out. Today, I am not even president of my own little home in Pennsylvania. I have a boss in the house who I take instructions from. However, by working intensely hard and making so many unimaginable sacrifices over that long stretch of time, all in pursuit of those absurd dreams, I learned a lot about myself, and about life. That is priceless knowledge.

Because of those vital life lessons that I learned, I am a great admirer of the sky-high ambitions that today’s young people have. Hard work and sacrifice build character and so we should promote those values as much as possible. Ambition is also the force that drives most of the scientific discoveries and technological advancements that improve human life. But, as the statistics Brooks provided show, only a small percentage of the people who shoot for the stars actually reach them. The question then becomes: How should those who don’t attain stardom handle their “failures?”

We tend to think of ourselves as failures because at the back of our minds, we see that as the way we are perceived by those who were watching our efforts that ultimately didn’t succeed. In essence, we let others define who and what we are. What we should do instead is to take personal satisfaction from the knowledge that we did our very best, but it wasn’t meant to be.

One crucial lesson that I learned from my disappointments was that shooting for the stars might not always get you there, but by doing that, you are likely to end up with second or third options that can be spectacular. Quite often, the attractiveness of such alternatives becomes clear only with the passage of time. The problem with setting a low bar from the outset is that if things don’t work out, the probability is quite high that one would end up with no alternative choices to pick from. That could very easily have been my situation. I might still be walking around in that dusty village in Ghana if I hadn’t set stretch goals for myself at that young age.

I have said many times that not going to Oxbridge is one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life. That “failure” was what opened the door for me to go to the Soviet Union in 1985. I didn’t become the president of any country (although there’s still hope), but I had a front-row seat to observe one of the greatest political leaders of the 20^thcentury. Being inside the Soviet Union and witnessing perestroika, from the very beginning to the very end, was an unforgettable experience. That is first-hand knowledge that only a handful of people in the world have. It is also knowledge that no institution, no matter how elite it is, can provide.

I was fortunate to have opportunities in later years to study at different universities here in America where I obtained Oxbridge-type education. Perestroika was a one-time event so I would have missed that entirely and forever if my original plan had played out perfectly. Seeing how ordinary people lived on either side of the Iron Curtain during that historic period taught me many things about life on our planet. We spend a lot of time nowadays talking about the ills of capitalism, of which there are many. Socialism, or some form of it, is frequently touted by some as an attractive alternative to rapacious neoliberalism. I am never convinced by those suggestions because of what I lived through in the Soviet Union. Being able to look at the world with clear eyes is extremely helpful. The grass is seldom greener on the other side.

Sometimes, when things don’t go according to plan, it may very well be the result of an unobservable but advantageous reordering of the sequence of our life events. Keeping that in mind in our moments of disappointment can help us keep our focus. I have looked back on many other experiences in my life that fit this pattern.

Generally, we acquire a lot of knowledge just by being on this planet and quietly observing our surroundings. Those of us who have been on Earth long enough are probably aware that the two most important things in life are good health, and happiness. Being healthy requires that we do certain basic things, such as eating a good diet and staying active. But our health is not always something that we have full control over, because of genetic factors. Happiness can be elusive as well. There are some people whose lives are awfully difficult because they are born into bleak environments where hope and opportunity are scarce to nonexistent. It would be grossly insensitive to tell such people to stop dwelling on their predicaments and be cheerful. Admittedly, people in the early parts of their lives also have all kinds of stresses on them because they are juggling family responsibilities while still trying to figure out their own futures.

For the vast majority of us however, happiness is a state of mind and, for the most part, we can either choose to be happy or miserable. We tend to be melancholy mainly because our attention is overly focused on what our peers have. We feel sorry for ourselves that our lives don’t look as great as theirs. While we do that, we almost completely forget that what we have in our hands is actually more than enough to give us joy.

We are told that money doesn’t buy happiness. That is not entirely true. Financial security is one of the greatest sources of happiness. But it doesn’t necessarily take high-paying employment in glamorous industries to attain that security. Disciplined management of resources and learning to live within one’s means are the best ways to do that. Stories abound of multi-millionaires, and even billionaires, who have gone bankrupt because they either spent lavishly or engaged in some other self-destructive behaviors.

No matter how one looks at it, today’s young generation is under enormous pressure on many fronts. The accompanying stress is something that, as a society, we need to keep a close eye on to ensure that we don’t end up with a full-blown national mental health crisis down the road. All of us, parents, teachers, and mentors, should engage in constant conversations with our youngsters to pass on some of the wisdom we have gained from our life experiences. We should nudge them to make the pursuit of happiness their primary focus, rather than the abstractions that we have been collectively using to measure success.