Is it achieving the goal that lights you up?
Or is it really the pursuit of that goal?
I’m thinking it’s the latter.
A rainy Saturday today felt like a good time to clean out the desk drawers in our home office.
The first pile of papers I picked up was the printed manuscript version #3 of my new book, Cementing Change: Cracking the Code for Communications That Work.
As I hauled the 5 pounds of paper from the file drawer onto my desk, I could not help but pause.
I gently removed the rubber band and began separating the several versions of reference note lists from the main body of work.
I said to myself, “This is how the sausage was made.”
I looked at all the tabs that earmarked edits, questions, citations to quadruple check, cross-references to confirm, and who knows what else.
As I thumbed through, moments of pride, exhaustion, sacrifice, dedication, and focus flooded my heart and mind.
I recalled the hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours scanning my memory banks, researching, conducting interviews and reviewing transcripts to find the best pearls of wisdom, and digging up former bodies of work – you know, the proof that validates what I wrote about.
It all began to build a compounding emotional reaction that left me a bit breathless.
As elated as I am that this book is now published and being read, I felt the loss of energy and fire in my heart and belly that it took to pursue achieving a goal I dreamt about for years.
Is that weird?
Have you ever felt that way before?
You work so hard toward something.
You put everything you have into it.
You sacrifice so much to make it happen.
Then, it happens.
It’s over. Mission accomplished.
You bask in the glory for a time – maybe too often, too short a time – then you turn your attention to something else, missing to some degree the fire inside you that motivated you to achieve that goal in the first place.
I have felt that way before.
After completing major projects at work.
After saying goodbye to the last guest who attended our wedding.
After working to select the next CEO of the non-profit whose Board I served on.
After filing the celebration of life slide show that I created to honor my older brother’s memory.
Today, I stopped long enough to spread 27 months of my life on the desk to snap a photo. I wanted to etch that moment in my mind and on my phone!
I stared at the pile for a few minutes. I couldn’t take my eyes off what I had accomplished.
Then I held a paperback copy of my book in my hands with the tenderness of holding a baby for the first time.
After carefully restacking “my paper baby”, I could not bring myself to plop the stack of paper into the shredding box we keep in the basement.
I’m not ready to say goodbye yet.
I set it on the attic stairs to file away with our “important documents.”
When I returned to our home office, I scanned my email and saw today’s edition of Admired Leader Field Notes. And to my great surprise – or maybe not – the title read, “The Anticlimax of Achieving a Big Goal.”
I was like, wow!
That’s ME RIGHT NOW!
I opened it and read it immediately.
It talks about exactly what I was feeling just minutes earlier.
It suggests: “Fulfillment, as it turns out, is less about an endpoint and more about ongoing engagement. It is the pursuit of a grand goal, not its attainment, that feeds the spirit.”
If that’s true – and on reflection today, I believe it is – then my spirit has been fed.
For now …
To your prosperity!
Ready to supercharge your results and rewrite your story? Dive into this dynamic chapter, where uncertainty at the airport becomes a powerful metaphor for navigating change in life and business.
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