Achievements are in many ways how we measure ourselves and others.
They give us a sense of where we place in the world.
They give us a framework to judge others by.
They make a lot of things simpler.
Achievements are also what people tend to strive after.
They give us something tangible to prove to ourselves that we made it.
Whatever “it” is.
However, while striving for achievements might provide temporary motivation, it also creates a strange hollowness in the person who actually achieves the thing.
Achievements are, in their own way, a double-edged sword.
Because while on one side they provide people with the ever so hard to come by motivation, on the other they steal attention from what actually matters.
They make you ask the wrong questions.
How far can I get?
How much can I earn?
How impressive can I become?
How quickly can I get there?
And because these questions have answers, they are seductive.
You can measure them.
You can compare them.
You can know whether you are winning.
The harder questions offer no such comfort.
Do I actually want this?
Would I still choose this life if nobody knew about it?
Do I want to be the person I have to become to get there?
What am I sacrificing without admitting that I am sacrificing it?
These questions are much harder to live with.
There is no scoreboard.
No title that settles them.
No amount of applause that can answer them for you.
And perhaps that is exactly why people so easily avoid them.
It is much easier to ask how to become successful than to ask whether the success you are chasing belongs to you in the first place.
Just look at the number of “successful” people who hate their lives.
People who got exactly what they spent years trying to get, only to discover that the achievement could not give them what they believed it would.
Because the achievement was rarely the thing they wanted.
They wanted what they imagined stood behind it.
Freedom.
Respect.
Security.
The feeling of finally being enough.
The permission to relax.
And then they arrive.
The number changes.
The title changes.
The house changes.
Other people begin looking at them differently.
But somehow they are still there.
Still restless.
Still comparing.
Still looking toward the next thing.
Because achievement cannot permanently resolve something that was never really about achievement.
If you needed the achievement to prove that you were enough, achieving it will not remove the need for proof.
Often it simply raises the standard.
What once seemed extraordinary becomes normal.
What once seemed like enough becomes the minimum.
The horizon moves again.
Achievements make you look at the horizon while making you forget the ground you stand on.
They make you forget what your days actually feel like.
What your relationships have become.
Whether your work interests you.
Whether you have time to think.
Whether you wake up wanting the life you have built.
People become so occupied with creating an impressive life that they don’t notice that they stopped enjoying it.
And the more impressive the life becomes, the harder it can be to admit.
Because now there is something to lose.
An identity.
A reputation.
A standard of living.
The admiration of other people.
You may eventually find yourself protecting a life you never consciously chose simply because you worked so hard to build it.
This is perhaps the deepest danger of achievement.
Not that achievement is bad.
But that it is very good at disguising misalignment.
If the numbers keep improving, you can tell yourself things are going well.
If people admire you, you can assume you are on the right path.
If you keep progressing, you never have to ask where you are progressing toward.
Achievement disguises movement as direction.
And those are not the same thing.
A person can move very quickly in the wrong direction.
He can become exceptionally good at something he never cared about.
He can win a game he never consciously chose to play.
He can spend decades becoming someone he once thought he was supposed to become.
And the tragedy is not that he failed.
It is that he succeeded.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to build something.
There is nothing wrong with money, status, mastery, recognition or winning.
But they are poor substitutes for knowing what you actually want.
The taste of achievement changes drastically when it is the consequence of devotion rather than the object of it.
You find the work worth doing.
The people worth loving.
The questions worth pursuing.
The life that feels worth inhabiting.
You give yourself to those things because they deserve your life.
Not because they make you look successful.
Not because they place you above someone else.
Not because they promise to finally make you enough.
And then, perhaps, achievements emerge along the way.
But by then, they will no longer matter.
I work privately with a small number of individuals who are serious about change.
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Sincerely,
Milo Morrison