Appreciating accomplishments.

Very often, when I speak the people who are going through a negative period In their life, one of the things that started the downward trip was that they stopped acknowledging their daily accomplishments.

Every single one of us accomplishes something every day. We often miss acknowledging this because in the modern fast-paced world achievements must be big and profound. Popular culture would have us all believe that we must launch a rocket to Mars, or something effectively preposterous every day, otherwise somehow it is not worth acknowledging. I had a personal example of this just the other day.

I had just uploaded my very first long format video (Article and Video Windows 10 basics part one) to YouTube and I instantly began to judge it against out plethora of professional and pseudo-professional offerings. For a while I felt like I had wasted almost 2 weeks worth of free time on this first project. Then I thought: "Wait a Minute!… I am learning as I go and in making pretty darn good use of the resources I have. It's not meant to be perfect… It was more important to get this first instalment posted." Indeed I am lucky because I realized to appreciate my achievement.

We are all learning as we go along in life and it is so critical for one's self-esteem to see and appreciate that in various forms. I watch a video the other day of a professor describing how to make the substance Graphene and was really struck by the time and patience he took in testing the substance he made. In doing so he got the maximum enjoyment out of the experience, not to mention the tremendous insights. Someone else might watch part of this video and get bored because at the point where he is verifying the results it's by slow repetitive measurements. But I think that's where he had the most fun, truly demonstrating that he created the substance and that it was tremendously strong. So by acknowledging the small achievements in this hour-long video he gained a tremendous boost emotionally and intellectually. All because what is important is acknowledging the small steps.

When you think about it we are all "Getting There" one step at a time. Take a moment to acknowledge those achievements.

Take care Patrick