Accomplishment
In a recent Dilbert cartoon, Dilbert describes various of his boss' mistakes that he successfully dealt with. The boss then tells him that he didn't accomplish anything. It reminded me that accomplishment is subjective. It's a personal thing, it depends on who's judging. Depending upon who makes the judgment, the same deeds can look like failure or they can represent accomplishment. A friend once reminded me that a one-legged person would most likely lose a foot race against a champion runner. Looked at one way the loss could represent a failure. But looked at another way, as my friend urged, the person's mere participation in the race could be viewed as a a significant accomplishment. If we believe that a victory would be the only way to accomplish something, the effort would end in failure. But if we accept how difficult it might be for the person to walk, simply walking a mile would be a significant accomplishment.
My friend's story points out that accomplishment requires answering some questions: What is our goal, what are our capabilities? We can't set goals without a realistic assessment of our capabilities, whether by making a careful self-assessment or by seeking the advice of an independent third party. If we overestimate our capabilities, we are in danger of setting goals that are impossible to attain, thus dooming ourselves to continual failure and, what's worse, continual feelings of failure. We must also avoid underestimating our capabilities because we might fail to set worthwhile attainable goals. Either way, failure to know our capabilities will hurt us.
Once we know our capabilities, we can set our goals. We need to test ourselves in the pursuit of realistic, worthwhile goals. If we can do that, attainment will give us a sense of accomplishment, the pleasure we want to feel in a job well done. If we set trivial goals that are difficult to attain, we will waste our time. If we set goals that are too easy to attain, achieving the goals will deny us a sense of accomplishment.
If we set worthwhile goals that are within our capabilities, other people's views won't matter. Only we can know the difficulty of attaining our goals, only we can know why our goals are important. And, by the way, it doesn't matter if we don't achieve our goals so long as we meet one additional test: We tried our best. If we do our best, no one can criticize us, no one can judge us, no one can accuse us.
Do your best to achieve attainable goals you find worthwhile. You'll feel good about yourself and, at the very least, serve as a shining example to others.
11-8-04
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