This article The Art & Beauty in Being Where You Are by Eve Arnold shares a perspective I hadn't heard before, and frankly had never thought of.
Most of what I've read with regard to understanding where you are and accepting it is with an air of resignation:
“You didn't get to a BMI of 45 overnight, and you won't get down to 22 overnight either.”
“You're in the job and career you're in at 51 because you drifted wherever. Four years of experience six times isn't nearly as good as 12 years of experience twice. That time is gone so you have to be especially purposeful now to change things more to your liking.”
“Your blood sugar is nearly 200 now. Major, largely unpalatable lifestyle changes will be needed now to right the ship before limbs start coming off and you start to go blind.”
Grieving the past and coming to terms with the present …
Michael Hyatt, former publishing house CEO turned Platform monarch and then the face of Full Focus, had as part of his Best Year Ever program (now a book) a step called “Come to Terms with the Past.”
The idea of this exercise was to grieve all of the things that went wrong in the past year — to let all of the disappointment, regret, heartache, and failure out in a giant gush of cry to achieve an emotional reset for the best year to come.
That's fine and all for a week-long C-suite retreat, but the proletariat normally don't have that kind of dominion over their lives to just step away from it all and work on themselves. Many are fortunate if they have time to linger in the shower a bit, rather than run through just long enough not to oppress their colleagues with stink.
Following the grieve-the-past exercise, often there's a self-assessment. Michael Hyatt at one point offered a spreadsheet called the LifeScore Assessment (now apparently trademarked as the Full Focus LifeScore). It outlined ten areas that reasonably comprise a well-rounded life and invited people to score themselves from 1 to 12 on each area. There were descriptions of benchmarks for each quartile to gauge whether you were a 2 in Spirituality or a 6 in Health.
Again, nothing about this is really designed to let you feel good about yourself. We're often hardest on ourselves, so if given the opportunity to rate ourselves, we're likely going to grade ourselves harshly. And even if we're in an incredibly healthy relationship with lots of sex, common goals, and tons of together time, at some level we still feel like we're lying to ourselves if we give ourselves a 12/12.
Achievers will achieve
Tom Rath wrote a book called StrengthsFinder 2.0 which describes thirty-four strengths of people. People embody a subset of these strengths more or less naturally, and conversely naturally don't embody the others.
The first of these strengths alphabetically is Achiever. Achievers — meaning those who naturally embody this strength — are driven by accomplishment. They love getting to the bottom of their to-do lists each day. They set goals and assemble plans to meet them — and are genuinely sad when they don't meet them, regardless of whether the reasons were in their control or not.
Michael Hyatt's top strength from the StrengthsFinder framework is Achiever. It should be no surprise, then, that he gets value out of assigning a score to how well things are going so that appropriate actions can be taken to propel that score higher.
Reflective people will reflect, but should not overthink
By contrast, Achiever was in the middle of the bottom half for me when I took the evaluation back in 2018. My top one is Intellection, meaning that I like to think.
I gave good thought to my answers with the LifeScore assessment, got the number out, and then had no interest in improving the score because who cares about a self-assessment score?! Not me apparently!
For the most part, I know the answers to where I stand in each area, and looking forward to something better, better, better hasn't been motivating.
Fortunately, Eve Arnold's words contain the answer:
As much as dreaming about anywhere else might feel good, it’s a false economy. Existing in the never-ending wants of the human mind leads to exhaustion.
But acceptance of defeat that this is life, and you are here leads to one remarkable thought: that here is pretty good.
~Eve Arnold
Yeah. Being where you are is pretty good. Here is pretty good.
Being your own competition is fine, and it's certainly healthier than comparing yourself to others better than you.
But if you're weary about how far you have to go, turn around for a moment and admire how far you've come.
And then realize that everything you can do to change your direction occurs not in the past, and not in the future, but in the present. Dwelling either in the past or in the future too much doesn't do anything for you now.
Now is good. Where you are is good.
And now is the best time to change direction.
(Header photo by Lindsay Henwood on Unsplash)