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You Can Be Proud of Your Progress and Still Want More
How to pursue your next goal without treating everything you have already done as insufficient.
Someone congratulates you, and before they have finished speaking, you begin explaining what still needs improving.
The project is complete, although you wish you had handled one section differently. You have become more consistent, but you missed two days last week. You reached the savings target, though it suddenly seems small compared with what you will eventually need.
The achievement gets a brief mention. The qualifications receive most of your attention.
You may regard this as being realistic. There is more work to do, and you do not want to become complacent. Perhaps you have learned to associate ambition with quickly moving on.
Over time, however, this habit can make progress strangely difficult to experience. Each goal matters while it is ahead of you. Once you reach it, you revise the standard and begin measuring the remaining distance.
You keep making an effort, yet rarely feel that the effort has amounted to much.
There is another way to approach personal growth. You can acknowledge what you have accomplished, enjoy what it makes possible, and still choose a meaningful next goal. Those…
