The Priceless Feeling Of Having Accomplished Something And How You Can Have It More Often.

I’m sure you know the feeling as well. When you have accomplished something, a deep sense of satisfaction arises. But why do we usually only allow ourselves this feeling when we have completed a big project?

A writer has this feeling of happiness when he writes The End under his manuscript.

An employee looks at the end of the week at the project he has successfully completed and feels excellent.

We finally finished our tax return after weeks of putting off this task and are proud of ourselves.

When we have accomplished something that took a lot of effort and energy, it is a priceless feeling. Having reached this point, strengthens our self-esteem. For a moment, we think that when we have done that, we can do anything.

But this great feeling disappears all too quickly. The next time is far away because big projects need a lot of time. In the meantime, we torture ourselves from day to day and have the feeling that we are barely making progress.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. Who says that we can only have this priceless feeling when we have completed a mammoth task?

You decide for yourself how big your goals are

The writer makes the mistake of defining only the finished book as his goal. In this way, he has to work many weeks and months until he is finally rewarded with the great satisfaction we all long for.

The employee only sees the complete project as the finish line. Before that, he believes he has no reason to be satisfied with himself.

When we do our tax return, we are not satisfied with ourselves until we send off the completed form. The way there is a single drudgery for us.

But what if we already consider the achievement of intermediate goals as success? Could we then perhaps have this good feeling much more often?

You bet we could.

More intermediate goals mean more moments of happiness

I am a writer myself, and I know that the prospect of completing an entire book at some point is not particularly motivating.

The goal is so far in the future that it hardly motivates me to do the necessary work today. That is why I have learned to break the big goal down into many small goals.

The smallest daily goal I have is to write anything at all. As soon as I have opened my laptop and written something, I can claim the first victory of the day for myself. I have overcome my tendency to procrastinate. One to zero for me.

A next goal is a certain number of words that I set myself for each day. As soon as I reach this number of words, I stop and call the day a success.

If you are an employee working on a big project, you can do the same. Every project consists of many small individual tasks anyway. Why don’t you simply define these small tasks as intermediate goals? Every time you reach one of these milestones, you have reason to congratulate yourself.

You can only do a tax return if you have all the necessary documents. You need documents from different areas of your life. The acquisition of each material is already a task in itself. So why not consider each of these small tasks as an interim goal?

Isn’t it self-deception to celebrate small, insignificant victories as if you had achieved something great?

Those who believe this do not understand that the whole thing is always made up of many parts. No great triumph is possible without many small, seemingly boring steps.

To misunderstand the importance of these small steps means not to value the process. Without the process, there is no result. A state is always the result of causal events that must have preceded this state.

Real self-deception occurs when we focus only on the result and see the process as a necessary evil.

More sense of achievement means more motivation to continue

Why should we even try to have more experiences of success? Isn’t it right to simply work with sheer willpower until we have completed a significant task? The result is the same in the end, isn’t it?

I claim that the result will even be much better if the path to it is paved with many small success moments. And the result will not only be qualitatively better, but we will also achieve it faster than would be possible through sheer willpower.

Willpower is a limited resource, which is exhausted in the course of a day. Once that power is used up, there is nothing we can do about it.

But the delight of reaching a goal, no matter how small, gives us a burst of energy. This energy drives us to keep going. Where our willpower would have been exhausted long ago, the euphoria drives us on and makes us aim for the next intermediate goal.

They say that success is addictive. If that is so, and I am convinced that it is, then there is no doubt. We should include as many intermediate goals in our projects as we can. The more of them we have, the more energy sources we have at our disposal.

Conclusion

It is up to us to decide how many experiences of success we can have every day. To have more of them, we just have to define our goals differently.

This is not a cheap sleight of hand that makes us believe we have achieved something when we are still miles away from our goal. On the contrary, it is a way to remove the illusion that only the big steps in life are significant. Nothing could be less true.

Without many small steps, there are no significant gains.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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