Accomplishments

If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.

~Mikhail Gorbachev

Many people say I’m the best women’s soccer player in the world. I don’t think so. And because of that, someday I just might be.

~Mia Hamm

What are you most proud of?

How much do you think about it?

There can be a tendency, especially as we get older, to believe that we’ve done our best work: We’ve run our fastest race; we’ve written our symphony; we’ve painted our masterpiece. We might go so far as to base our identities on our past accomplishments rather than on our current lives.

It is interesting to think of the periods in our lives when we were (or will be) on fire. When is our heyday? If we think it was in the past or will be well into the future, that’s a sign we’re not living our lives the way we could. Why can’t our heyday be right now?

At some point, many of us have the temptation to rest on our laurels. We might feel like our accomplishments have earned us the chance to relax, to let off the gas a bit, to reflect on our glory days.

Naturally there are times in our lives when we have the energy and the flexibility to go all out. When we’re young, we have the arrogance of youth coupled with the exuberance and excitement of everything being new. The world is our oyster and we’re the alpha pearl.

Although we may have more of these qualities when we’re young, we obtain others as we get older. As we gain experience, we get all the things that go along with it: wisdom, maturity, and a more fully informed understanding of the way things work. What we might lose in youthful energy and enthusiasm, we gain in efficiency and effectiveness.

One quality that is necessary for success – both when we’re young and when we’re “not so young” – is the ability to live in the moment. If we’re resting on our laurels and thinking about what we’ve already accomplished, we’re not thinking about what we can accomplish today.

If we fall into a pattern of living in the past, it might be helpful to reshuffle the deck. Changing things up can force us to rethink how we live our lives or do our jobs. Anything that provides us with new challenges has the potential to lead to great things. It may be a small thing or a big thing, but it must have the potential to lead to great things. We just have to have the awareness to recognize them and the initiative to take advantage of them.

There is nothing wrong with the feeling of satisfaction that comes with achieving a goal, but each new moment brings new opportunities. Pride can only hold our attention so long before it becomes irrelevant or even harmful. The rehashing of our glory days can get stale very quickly. No matter how successful we’ve been, our lives will be more interesting and fulfilling if we continue to try to do great things.

Who we are matters much more than who we were, even for the most accomplished among us.