Tag: accomplishments

Re-Prioritization

It all started with a question in a job interview.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I froze in my chair at the conference room table, unsure how to respond.

I didn’t have the luxury of thinking five years down the road. I’d recently gotten laid off, less than a year into my marketing career. I was still new in town and devoid of a support network.

I needed this job, now. I needed the income to pay the bills. And I needed the legitimacy of a stable assignment to prove my professional worth.

So, I came up with a boilerplate answer. And I ultimately landed the job.

I was set, but far from settled.

For even as I sat in my cubicle – with a full list of clients to support and a steady salary – I thought about the question from the interview.

I was still in my mid-twenties, but I’d bounced around a bit already. And I’d seen the costs of such transience.

I needed a five-year plan badly.

So, I gave my future some thought. I put a plan together. And I strove to make it a reality.

My journey to better started quietly.

I was doing well enough in my job, but I knew more mastery was on the horizon. So, I earned some Digital Marketing certifications, proudly displaying the badges in my cubicle and on my social media profiles.

Still, I knew that a certification badge could only get me so far. I resolved to think bigger.

So, I took the GMAT and applied to business schools. Then I enrolled in a Masters’ of Business Administration (MBA) program that held classes in the evenings. This allowed me to obtain full marketing training in the classroom and earn a prestigious degree – all without requiring me to quit my job.

I earned my MBA roughly five years after I had hashed out my five-year plan. Now, there was just one more step to fully attain it.

I started looking at other jobs, hoping to land a prestigious role with a prominent company. My post-MBA job, as it were.

I set a hard deadline for myself. By the time the new year arrived, I’d be in a new place professionally. Since the upcoming year was 2020, I dubbed this plan 2.0 in 2020.

But despite my best efforts, I didn’t land that job by the dawn of the new decade. And a few months after New Year’s Day, a global pandemic turned the world upside down.

My five-year plan was now in limbo. I hung on to my existing job for dear life. And my grip tightened further after my employer was acquired by a larger company – leading to job redundancy fears.

Everything I had hoped for was hopelessly off-course.

What on earth was I going to do?

Plans be damned. Seize opportunities.

That’s what I told myself as 2020 faded into the rearview.

The most restrictive portion of the pandemic had passed. My job had not been made redundant. And the holding pattern hanging over my life had started to lift.

So, I jumped on an opportunity to move over to my new employer’s corporate marketing team. I dove headfirst into the new role – making connections, drafting materials, and traveling coast to coast to evangelize the business segment I was now supporting.

Off the clock, I seized the opportunity to exercise more frequently. I joined running clubs, entered in races of longer and longer distances, and started taking home hardware from them.

None of this had been in my prior plans. All of it seemed like a happy accident.

But I wasn’t complaining about the result. I was just hoping the good times would continue.

They didn’t.

Economic headwinds led my employer to reorganize itself several times, with the shifts changing the nature of my role. Meanwhile, a series of injuries stopped my running exploits in their tracks.

Once again, I was trapped. The five-year plan had already stalled out. And now, the Carpe Diem approach had also run aground.

What on earth was I going to do?

What are you chasing?

This question was at the heart of the inquiry into my five-year plan, whether the job interviewer knew it or not.

And even after drafting that plan, I struggled to adequately address the core premise.

I found myself oscillating between prestige and stability over the intervening years, striving for one and falling back on the other when the rug inevitably got yanked from below my feet.

This process left some scars. But as those scars accumulated, my determination only deepened.

I would get this right. I would uncover the answer.

But recently, something has changed. I’ve started to wonder whether I’ve been asking the right question.

You see, I’ve been blessed with a great support network throughout. Family, friends, and peers have been there for me on every step of my winding odyssey through life.

But I’m not so sure the inverse has been true.

Sure, I’ve supported my supporters through the years. But only to a point.

For as I worked on my five-year plan – and the carpe diem era that replaced it – I mostly lost track of what was going on with my friends and family. Sometimes, I lost touch with them entirely for months on end.

It was easy to overlook this development. After all, with every twist and turn in my journey, I grew my social circle.

There were new people to connect with and new sources of support to rely on. So, I missed the obvious signs that things had gone awry with the others in my orbit.

But my eyes are wide open now.

I realize how much what I missed matters, and how little what I was chasing really meant.

Sure, it’s nice to have objectives, and the trappings of a profession can help maintain a lifestyle.

But the connections with our community are the ties that bind. Being there for those who support us — in the good times and the tough ones — is nothing short of essential. It can sustain us — enriching our experience on this rock and enhancing our legacy after we leave it.

So, consider this my re-prioritization.

I might continue to demand more of myself professionally and recreationally. But I will no longer act as this venture is Item 1A, or even 1B.

Where I’ll be in five years is hardly the point. Who will be in my orbit means far more.

Accomplishments and Stepping Stones

Celebrate good times. Come on!

If you’ve been to any party or other social gathering with a boombox, you’ve likely heard this song.

And you probably saw someone too old, too overweight or too uncoordinated — or maybe all three — gleefully letting loose on the dance floor to Kool and the Gang’s upbeat rhythms.

It’s an odd mixture. Big smiles, cringeworthy dance moves and a song we rarely listen to on any other occasion.

Yet, it’s as much a part of our culture as Apple Pie and Fireworks on the Fourth of July.

For we are wired to go all-out to recognize accomplishments. To rent out that hotel ballroom, put on our formal wear, hire the expensive DJ and invite all our family and friends to come join us.

We do this for weddings, birthdays and graduations. For anniversaries and reunions. If there’s an accomplishment to be had, it will be celebrated with glamour and gusto.

At first glance, it all seems innocuous enough. After all, what’s so wrong about one night of fun?

A lot, it turns out.

There is a phrase making the rounds. One still riding the embers of the afterglow, a decade after it went viral.

That phrase? Start With Why.

Simon Sinek introduced the phrase to the world through a TEDx Talk and a bestselling book. And many of us have been finding our Why ever since.

On the whole, this is a good thing. We operate better — as people, corporations and social systems — when we have a clear North Star.

Purpose drives passion. Passion drives productivity. And productivity drives results.

But the Start With Why model is not a panacea. It’s a finite resource, meant to be used in moderation. And we’ve spread it way too thin.

Consider this. Many 5-year-olds these days will have a Pre-K Graduation. They’ll put on a miniature cap and gown and pose for pictures. All in front of their beaming parents.

What is the Why behind this celebration? Those kids in the caps and gowns haven’t even gone to school yet. The experience of sitting in those tiny desks, reading what the teacher is writing on the whiteboard — it’s all foreign to them.

No, these Pre-K graduations are all for the parents. It’s another photo opportunity, another chance for a social media status update showcasing their child’s latest accomplishment. Even if that accomplishment is simply being at a daycare center 45 hours a week, while their parents are at the office.

The celebration does not match the occasion.

Compare this with my Kindergarten graduation. My class had a barbecue on an early summer evening with our teachers in the school’s recess yard. Our parents weren’t allowed to attend.

I remember being nervous at first. I had hardly ever been away from my parents or grandparents after dark at that point in my life, and I didn’t know what to expect. But after several hours of running around outside, eating burgers and toasting marshmallows on a campfire, I was actually bummed when my parents came to pick me up. I wanted to stay longer.

The barbecue was a celebration. But it was very down to earth.

I don’t remember feeling as if I had accomplished anything in particular. I just remember having fun hanging out with my friends and teachers.

And for a shy, introverted kid, that was sufficient.

Our daily lives are full of accomplishments these days.

If you participate in a 5K race, you’ll get a finisher medal. Even if it takes you an hour and a half to walk the course.

If you’re a teenage girl, you get to sport a fancy evening gown and ride in a limo. Simply for turning sixteen.

And if you’re done with daycare, you get that Pre-K graduation.

These disparate celebrations have one thing in common. They’re really all about showing up.

About making your way to the 5K course. About waking up on your sixteenth birthday. About being at that daycare program day after day — even if you’re too young to have anywhere else to go anyway.

Is this really how we want to define accomplishment? As the moments we reach by default?

I certainly hope not.

For accomplishments are not about the end of a chapter. They’re not about the changing of a calendar field. Or adding another year to our age.

Those are arbitrary occurrences that occur without our direct influence.

No, accomplishments — true accomplishments — are that which we attain through transformation. They’re markers of the change we either initiate or manage. They’re our reflection after we get to the other side of that tunnel.

When it comes to our personal lives, marriage is an accomplishment. So is the advent of parenthood.

On the work side of the equation, earning a promotion to a new position can be an accomplishment. And if your work leads to a positive change in society, that’s an accomplishment as well.

Simply showing up is not sufficient. To realize an accomplishment, you have to give something more.

As I write this, I am not far removed from my MBA graduation.

Not long ago, I put on a cap, gown and decorative hood. I walked across a stage in a basketball arena, and was handed a diploma cover. I posed for endless pictures, holding my smile in place until my face hurt.

In the weeks after this occasion, dozens of people offered congratulations. They talked about what a significant achievement this was, and asked me what I had planned to do next.

The thing is, I’m actually not done with my business school classes yet.

My MBA program actually holds ceremonies for summer graduates three months before the completion date of our classes. So, the inside of that diploma cover is empty. All of those well-wishes premature.

Some of my classmates speak of how odd the whole situation has been. Of how the graduation ceremony felt like a tease.

Yet, I do not share these laments.

I am still not sure what we were celebrating in the first place. Because I don’t view the act of completing an MBA program as an accomplishment.

Now, I’m sure some of my dear readers might consider this statement to be crazy. Perhaps most of them do.

After all, business school is no day at the beach. It’s challenging, stressful and transformative.

But if you boil it all down, an MBA program is a service. A service I paid for and have, at the time of this writing, nearly completely attained.

An MBA can open doors. But, as with any university degree, it alone guarantees me nothing.

So, from that perspective, considering my graduation an accomplishment is akin to getting a trophy for showing up. Not my cup of tea.

This is not to say that such celebrations as an MBA graduation are worthless.

For while I feel the near-completion of a business school regimen is not significant on its own, the opportunities it can unlock certainly are.

Those opportunities, when realized, represent the true accomplishments from this endeavor.

But they’re only possible if you go through the ringer first. If you show up and don’t give up. If you do the seemingly ordinary things that lead you to sport a cap and gown. The very things that lead to a disproportionate of well-wishes from onlookers.

Society considers the aggregation of these mundane moments as accomplishments. I prefer to call them stepping stones.

Such a term represents the long game, not the endgame. It illustrates a fluid state of affairs — one where each seminal moment leads to the next challenge.

The stepping stone analogy taps into the power of connection.

Of the ties that bind between our experiences.

Of how, in the words of Semisonic, Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

There is something blissfully pure about that concept.

I find strength in it. I’m sure you can as well.

Sure, it’s not quite as fun as throwing a party for the next milestone. And it might demand more introspection than we’re comfortable with.

But that dash of perspective keeps us aligned. It inspires us to keep climbing, keep aspiring, keep achieving.

That’s a great gift to give ourselves and those around us. 

Let’s give it.