You’re Only As Good As What You Accomplish

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about persistence and the countless benefits of temporary suffering for the benefit of longterm joy. While I endeavoured to contrast quitting and persevering, reading between the lines would allow you to see how much I valued perseverance in retrospect.

Although I explored it a bit in that blog, I’ve had a thought that’s been nagging on my mind ever since about the difficulty of persistence. Here’s the big question on my mind:

Why is persevering so hard?

In a roundabout way, the answer is the question: it’s persevering. It means that something is actively fighting against what you are trying to accomplish. It is swimming upstream. It is inherently hard.

If it isn’t hard, it isn’t persevering.

And that thought brings about with it a whole handful of other ideas that have been on my mind for… so long I couldn’t even quantify it (we’ll be conservative and estimate a year).

You’re only as good as what you accomplish

Did that statement scare you? It scared me a little! Actually, scratch that. Present tense. It does scare me. Actively.

I can almost hear the chorus of protest as I type that sentence. “Woah woah woah, Aidan! You can’t just tell someone they’re only as good as what they accomplish! That’s awful!”

On the one hand, I agree with you! My faith as a Christian is built upon the very idea that we cannot earn (nor certainly deserve) the value placed upon us. We cannot earn our salvation. It is a free gift that is offered to us. We are only valuable because God, the Creator, deems us so. Not because we have anything inherently good about us.

In fact, scripture teaches us (through implication more than clear indication) that if you were to measure the good VS bad of our lives, even Mother Theresa wouldn’t end her life in the positive.

So if I can believe that people are valuable through no doing of their own but solely that which God the Father bestows upon them, how can I say someone’s only as good as what they accomplish?

First of all: become less cosmic. I’m not talking on the scale of someone’s entire life value. That’s an entirely separate conversation. And, as a quick aside, it is—indeed—possible to hold two opposing beliefs that are both true.

Secondly: I don’t really mean people are only as good as what they accomplish. But certainly what we accomplish indicates a lot about who we were as people in our finite time on earth. It also indicates a lot about how we’ll be remembered, if that’s of any importance to you.

Everyone Who is Considered “Great”

Go on a short journey with me.

Think of a hero in your life. Might be your dad or your grandpa. Could very well be a stand-out school teacher. It might be a coworker. Could even be a guy who pulled over when he saw you struggling on the side of the road to change a flat tire you have no business attempting.

Now, if you had to write an essay on why that person was great, what would you say?

Surely you’d tell stories about the phenomenal things they did. You don’t define them as great because “they really wanted to make the world a better place.” No, you define them as great because they did.

And that distinction between the two is what I really want to bring to light here.

I don’t know if this is a radical train of thought or a very elementary one. But it’s one that I’ve been riding nonetheless.

Alexander Hamilton

If you read what I wrote about my daily discipline of writing in 2022, you’d have read that I’m a fan of Alexander Hamilton; particularly the fictionalized version of him from Broadway (the man could rap), but also what the real one accomplished in his life.

Dude was the Secretary of the Treasury of the USA in 1789. He founded the US Navy! He ratified the US Constitution by writing 51 of 85 essays called the Federalist Papers which were foundational to interpreting the Constitution. Those are just a handful of things you learn about in the play or by reading his (extensive) Wikipedia page.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

We don’t remember Alexander because he had cool ideas. We don’t remember him because he had great intentions. We remember him because he did really phenomenal stuff.

Of all the things he accomplished, I like to think about him writing those 51 essays of the Federalist Papers. Particularly the first one or two. No one was insisting he do this (to my very limited knowledge). He felt compelled, so he picked up a pen and he wrote. And he wrote. And he wrote! Fast forward, I like to think of the last few: numbers 49, 50, 51.

What was going through his mind as he wrote those? Did he know what an impact he was going to have on the US? Did he know how influential he’d be? Did he hesitate believing no one would read what he’d wrote? Did he have doubts about himself? Because he surely didn’t show them!

I think Hamilton is so great because he understood the principle of perseverance so, so deeply. And he was able to accomplish so much because he was relentless. Past what anyone would consider reasonable.

Beyond What People Understand

Among the other aspects that accompany perseverance (like it being unglamorous, difficult, focused on the longterm), perhaps one of the others you should be aware of is just how misunderstood (or un-understood) you’re going to feel by anyone who doesn’t get it.

Even trying to explain to someone why I’ve taken it upon myself to write daily in 2022 doesn’t work for most people. “Why? What’s the benefit? Isn’t that going to be a lot of work?”

I myself question this journey sometimes. But when I re-read the blog I wrote first outlining the initiative, particularly the section about wanting to be prolific and not really understanding why, I’m reminded that it’s important to push through the inability to define “why” and keep doing it.

The thing about persevering is that it looks crazy from the outside. It doesn’t add up. Sometimes from the inside it doesn’t add up! The benefit seems too small or non-existent. But when you accomplish what you’re setting out to accomplish, the effort it took to get there starts to make a lot more sense.

And maybe the “looking crazy from the outside” thing has nothing to do with not understanding the objective. It might have to do with the comparison game. “I could never dedicate myself to doing that.” Reasonable enough! I didn’t think so either—until I did.

All Creativity is Struggle

How many of the greatest songs ever written are based on a struggle of some kind? Struggle about being in love, struggle against the government, struggle against yourself. I mean, try to show me a phenomenal song that isn’t about struggle.

Same idea applied in another way:

I don’t want to go as far as to say that evil is necessary for good to be good, but it sort of makes sense, doesn’t it? Would we appreciate a sunny day if we never knew what overcast was like? Would we love summer if we didn’t know the bone-chilling cold of winter?

Contrast allows us to appreciate things on a deeper level.

Maybe there’s a direct correlation between the amount of struggle something entails and how rewarding it is in the end.

Someone can only be heroic or courageous when there is reason to be scared and nervous. It’s foundational to the very title.

Ideas & Intentions are Meaningless

Yet another hot take that is filling up this particular blog.

I think people focus too much on ideas and too little on their execution. It’s been my experience that probably 80% of ideas are harder to execute than they seem. If you struggled just to come up with an idea, then I got bad news for you about actually doing anything with it.

Similarly with your intentions. In an extreme sense: say you’re driving your car a little too fast and T-bone another car. Does it matter that your intention wasn’t to hurt someone? Not at all. Because when our intention and our actions don’t align (or the action is non-existent), both become rather meaningless.

An Encouragement

This blog might seem to be focusing on the negative, and I really hate that (hahaha). Because it’s meant to be more encouraging than discouraging (maybe 90/10).

You are only as good as what you accomplish. Maybe sometimes that’s for the better, because we (as a race) tend to have a lot of stupid ideas too. Probably good many of them never come to fruition.

Maybe the difficulty of doing anything with our ideas is a strategic, forced opportunity to re-evaluate their worth.

If something really valuable was really easy to do, would it lose its value because it would become more common? In other words, is something only valuable because it is difficult? I don’t think so. But that’s another thought to let roll around in your head (as if I haven’t presented enough of those here).

Valuable ideas being difficult to execute also allows us to refine our course as we progress. Sometimes we start something without having the entire course mapped out; and that’s ok. The length of time we’re committing to do something can also be a blessing to help us understand it better.

Your Most Valuable Resource

Anything you should hope to accomplish in your life is likely going to involve a lot of your most valuable resource: time. Effort comes and goes, but we prove something is valuable to us when we give it our time. We only have so much of it to go around.

Take this as an opportunity to re-evaluate the way you’re spending your time in relation to what it is accomplishing.

Are you happy with how you spent your time the past 7 days? Enough sleep? Work too much? See any friends? Read enough? Learn enough? Create enough? Hang with your loved ones enough?

Recognize this very simple and important truth:

We make time for the things that are important to us.

No excuses. Spend wisely.

Your mouth can say one thing about what’s important to you, but the way you spend your time and money tells the truth. I don’t care what you accomplish: that’s up to you. Just make sure you’re working on something that matters. I’m only 28, and I already know that the time slips by too quickly if we don’t take action today.

Not tomorrow.

Today.

What My Kids Will Remember

If I work from 7am until 9pm every day of my life, my kids won’t ever remember my really great intentions to be a good dad. They’re only going to remember that I was a workaholic who was never around.

Above all, this is my biggest motivation—and biggest justification—that what you actually follow through on matters a hell of a lot more than what you set out to do in the beginning.

If you’ve been accomplishing a lot of things you didn’t want to accomplish, or just a whole lot of nothing, remember that it’s never too late to change.

You don’t have to be the person you were 5 minutes ago.