What Is Your Greatest Achievement?

My 25-year high school reunion is next month. I’ll probably go. My best friend from high school intends to go (we’ve been friends for almost 30 years now), and it will be fun to catch up with other old friends.

There can be some amusement at a high school reunion as you see that everyone has grown fatter, balder, and more married. The jock is now an insurance salesperson with two kids. The star of the school play now manages a restaurant. That sort of thing…

When I reflect back on what I’ve learned in the past 25 years since graduating high school, I ask myself what accomplishments I appreciate most. I’m not interested in showing off to my peers. I simply wonder how I’d answer this for myself.

My high school self was a straight-A student, graduating with top honors, excited about going to college, and following the path that society had laid out for him. I was expected to continue along that path. I excelled in school partly because my goals aligned with other people’s expectations. I had little social resistance and plenty of social support for most of what I wanted to do. Nobody tried to talk me out of pursuing a computer science degree.

The real tests came when I wanted to do something that other people didn’t agree with, such as starting my own business or going vegetarian. For whatever reason, those types of tests came up often for me.

Because of the path I followed since high school, I strengthened my independent will. Today I’m able to follow my conscience and make decisions based on my character, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings on a matter, and not be overly dissuaded from my course even if many people around me disagree. I’m capable of following my path with a heart in ways that would surprise my high school self.

Back in high school, it was a big deal for me to share with a few close friends that I didn’t believe in the whole Christian god story anymore. Now I find it much easier to share my thoughts and feelings openly regardless of how people may react. Religion is spiritual immaturity, the fool’s path of growth. If people feel a need to go kittywompus when they hear me say that, I let them go kittywompus.

Today I take better advantage of my freedom than my high school self ever did. He felt very constrained, but he still honored most of the constraints that other people placed around him. I’ve since lost respect for externally imposed constraints. I do value constraints, but only if they align with my values. If I don’t agree with other people’s rules or conventions, I largely ignore them. I still consider predictable consequences, but I don’t follow rules merely for the sake of following rules. I think for myself and make decisions based on what I think is right, regardless of what the standard procedure is supposed to be.

If I hadn’t been able to develop my independent will, I wouldn’t have been able to go vegan. I wouldn’t have been able to leave an unfulfilling marriage. I wouldn’t have started two businesses. I wouldn’t be blogging or speaking publicly. I wouldn’t have given away the copyrights to my work.

Often when I talk to people my own age, I find it hard to relate to them. So many of my peers seem overly scared… so fearful of taking risks. They’re afraid to lose what they have, but the irony is that they don’t even appreciate what they have. Most of the time their fear isn’t about taking on risks for themselves. Quite often they’re willing and able to do that. Their greater fear is dealing with people’s judgments of them, especially if they fail to achieve their goals quickly.

What if I fail and my family thinks I’m a loser?

So they’ll think you’re a loser. That doesn’t even matter. You have no obligation to impress them. Follow your path. Let them do the same. If you fail, then fail with style, and take pride in that. Then get up and try again. Stop making failure into this big scary beast. It’s just a road bump. There will be lots of road bumps in your life if you want to do anything remotely interesting.

What if I fail and my spouse leaves me?

Then s/he wasn’t much of a spouse to begin with. This will be a good test to see if you chose someone who can handle you being you. If not, good riddance. You’ll find a better match afterwards. If you want to develop your courage, and you marry someone who’s afraid of that, don’t expect that marriage to last.

What if I lose all my money?

Then you’ll have no money. You can start fresh and earn more. The game doesn’t end just because your gold gets low. The point of the game is to grow, not to acquire gold. If you get on an interesting path of growth, you may very well lose all your money, perhaps multiple times. You may as well get used to it.

These are the kinds of fears that hold people back so much in life.

I’m relieved that I didn’t turn out that way, that I embraced a path of experimentation and failure — and that I find pleasure and meaning in decisions that don’t always turn out well.

I feel good about how far I’ve come since high school, but that feeling isn’t due to external accomplishments that might impress anyone else. I feel good about becoming a man who can act in alignment with his conscience, even when everyone else disagrees.

I don’t eat animal products. I consider it unethical.

I don’t have a regular job. Doing repetitive work for pay seems like a waste of life. It’s not worth the reduction in freedom.

I give away most of my creative work for free (and uncopyrighted), so anyone can share it easily. That feels good to me.

My thoughts, feelings, and behaviors aren’t that unusual. Many people feel the same as I do about these subjects. They agree that it would be more ethical to drop animal products. They’d rather not spend years of their life working for someone else. And they like the idea of expressing their creativity and contributing. The difference is that they let their fears about other people’s reactions stop them from making a bigger push in those directions.

I feel very fortunate that something inside me popped and said, “Nope, can’t live like that.”

In reflecting back on the past 25 years, the achievement I’m most proud of was to become a man who finds it unnecessary to satisfy others’ expectations of him. That gave me the freedom to create a life that I enjoy and appreciate.

I also look forward to the possibility that another 25 years from now, my future self may look back once again and reflect upon how much he’s grown. I cannot know what he’ll be like, but I can predict that his path would surprise me. I like that.

What’s your greatest life achievement thus far? What accomplishments do you appreciate the most? Would you name one of your public wins? Or one of your private victories?

Steve Recommends
Here are my recommendations for products and services I've reviewed that can improve your results. This is a short list since it only includes my top picks.

Spring Forest Healingfest (Free) - Learn to heal yourself with qi gong
Site Build It! - Use SBI to start your own money-making website
Getting Rich with Ebooks - Earn passive income from ebooks
Lefkoe Method - Permanently eliminate a limiting belief in 20 minutes
PhotoReading - Read books 3 times faster
Paraliminals - Condition your mind for positive thinking and success
The Journal - Record your life lessons in a secure private journal
Sedona Method (FREE audios) - Release your blocks in a few minutes
Life on Purpose - A step-by-step process to discover your life purpose

If you've found Steve's work helpful, please donate to show your support.
Get Steve's Free Newsletter to stay in touch and receive the newest updates

View the original article here

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

Guest Reviewer: Walter Isaacson on The Social Animal

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

David Brooks has written an absolutely fascinating book about how we form our emotions and character. Standing at the intersection of brain science and sociology, and writing with the wry wit of a James Thurber, he explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people. In The Social Animal, he makes the recent revolution in neuroscience understandable, and he applies it to those things we have the most trouble knowing how to teach: What is the best way to build true relationships? How do we instill imaginative thinking? How do we develop our moral intuitions and wisdom and character? Brooks has always been a keen observer of the way we live. Now he takes us one layer down, to why we live that way.

--Walter Isaacson

An Amazon Interview with David Brooks

We talked with David Brooks about, among other things, Jonathan Franzen, Freud, and Brooks's own unfamiliar emotions, just before the publication of The Social Animal. You can read the full interview on Omnivoracious, the Amazon books blog, including this exchange:

Amazon.com: Speaking of Tolstoy, I bet a lot of people are going to quoting the first line of Anna Karenina to you: "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Is there a consistency between what makes a family happy, the way that this family turns out to be?

Brooks: You know, I never bought Tolstoy's line.

Amazon.com: I didn't either.

Brooks: I didn't know many happy families that were alike. One of the things you learn is that we're all so much more complex. We all contain multitudes, so someone who might be a bully in one circumstance is incredibly compassionate in other circumstances. We have multiple selves, and the idea that we can have a very simple view of who we are, what our character is, that's actually not right.

One of the things all this research shows you is how humble you have to be in the face of the complexity of human nature. We've got a 100 billion neurons in the brain, and it's just phenomenally complicated. You take a little child who says, "I'm a tiger," and pretends to be a tiger. Well that act of imagination--conflating this thing "I" with this thing "tiger"--is phenomenally complicated. No computer could ever do that, but it's happening below the level of awareness. It seems so easy to us. And so one of the things these people learn is they contain these hidden strengths, but at the same time they have to be consciously aware of how modest they can be in understanding themselves and proceed on that basis.

A Letter from Author David Brooks

© Josh Haner, The New York Times

Several years ago I did some reporting on why so many kids drop out of high school, despite all rational incentives. That took me quickly to studies of early childhood and research on brain formation. Once I started poking around that realm, I found that people who study the mind are giving us an entirely new perspective on who we are and what it takes to flourish.

We’re used to a certain story of success, one that emphasizes getting good grades, getting the right job skills and making the right decisions. But these scientists were peering into the innermost mind and shedding light on the process one level down, in the realm of emotions, intuitions, perceptions, genetic dispositions and unconscious longings.

I’ve spent several years with their work now, and it’s changed my perspective on everything. In this book, I try to take their various findings and weave them together into one story.

This is not a science book. I don’t answer how the brain does things. I try to answer what it all means. I try to explain how these findings about the deepest recesses of our minds should change the way we see ourselves, raise our kids, conduct business, teach, manage our relationships and practice politics. This story is based on scientific research, but it is really about emotion, character, virtue and love. We’re not rational animals, or laboring animals; we’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with each other and connect to larger ideas.

Price: $27.00

Click here to buy from Amazon

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

Guest Reviewer: Walter Isaacson on The Social Animal

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

David Brooks has written an absolutely fascinating book about how we form our emotions and character. Standing at the intersection of brain science and sociology, and writing with the wry wit of a James Thurber, he explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people. In The Social Animal, he makes the recent revolution in neuroscience understandable, and he applies it to those things we have the most trouble knowing how to teach: What is the best way to build true relationships? How do we instill imaginative thinking? How do we develop our moral intuitions and wisdom and character? Brooks has always been a keen observer of the way we live. Now he takes us one layer down, to why we live that way.

--Walter Isaacson

A Letter from Author David Brooks

© Josh Haner, The New York Times

Several years ago I did some reporting on why so many kids drop out of high school, despite all rational incentives. That took me quickly to studies of early childhood and research on brain formation. Once I started poking around that realm, I found that people who study the mind are giving us an entirely new perspective on who we are and what it takes to flourish.

We’re used to a certain story of success, one that emphasizes getting good grades, getting the right job skills and making the right decisions. But these scientists were peering into the innermost mind and shedding light on the process one level down, in the realm of emotions, intuitions, perceptions, genetic dispositions and unconscious longings.

I’ve spent several years with their work now, and it’s changed my perspective on everything. In this book, I try to take their various findings and weave them together into one story.

This is not a science book. I don’t answer how the brain does things. I try to answer what it all means. I try to explain how these findings about the deepest recesses of our minds should change the way we see ourselves, raise our kids, conduct business, teach, manage our relationships and practice politics. This story is based on scientific research, but it is really about emotion, character, virtue and love. We’re not rational animals, or laboring animals; we’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with each other and connect to larger ideas.

Price: $27.00

Click here to buy from Amazon