Every now and then, I read something that stops me dead in my tracks.
“Your last day on earth, the person you became meets the person you wanted to become.”
We spend so much time putting goals in place, reading productivity books, books on “life-hacks,” watching TED Talks…yet, how often do we stop and think “am I becoming the person I want to be?”
We turn our focus on skills. Accomplishments. Acquisition of stuff. Titles. Money. We focus on the what and the how.
But do we ever stop to focus on who and the why? Who we are and who want to be? What our why is?
As kids, we’re full of hope, full of dreams. We find ourselves thinking or saying “I’ll never be like that when I grow up…” and then we find ourselves as grown-ups doing the very things we swore we’d never do. We surround ourselves with toxic relationships. We become full of anger, resentment, self-loathing and disappointment. And we ask ourselves: how did we get here?
The Choices We Make
I have a 13 year-old son. Ever since he was old enough to understand, I’ve used the following phrase with him: The choices you make, make you.
People don’t wake up one day and decide to be bad or good. They don’t wake up and decide to go off the right path or stay on it. We don’t make a single decision to enter into a toxic relationship.
We end up there through a series of choices, so that in the end, the choices we make is who we become. Goals and accomplishments are important, sure. But think about a house that is rotting on the inside yet the owner chooses to slap a new coat of paint on the exterior. Wouldn’t you wonder why they are ignoring the foundation of the house? Why they are only focused on the exterior?
That’s often what we do by focusing on accomplishments or reaching some external goal (like a new title, more money, etc). We aren’t spending nearly enough time fixing the “rot” on the inside but instead slapping a new coat of paint (accomplishments) on the outside so that others think “hey, they have their shit together.”
And, honestly? So many of us don’t.
Every Action Has A Consequence
The other thing I share with my son is that every action has a consequence. Now, in our society the word “consequence” usually has a negative connotation, but the actual definition of consequence is:
A result or effect of an action or condition.
Each action, each step we take…has a consequence. Throw a pebble into a lake and watch the ripples spread out from there. The same is true for our actions. But we spend so little time thinking about the consequence; so little time thinking about the outcome or the ripples that may be created. And so, we take actions without considering the outcome and wonder how we became this person we never wanted to become. We can’t remember deciding to become this angry, bitter person…but here we are.
We didn’t actively decide, but we did choose. We chose every action; took every step. And those actions had a consequence.
What vs Who
Our actions are influenced and even determined by our focus. Being too focused on ‘what’ and ‘how’ puts blinders on us. We can only see the goal, not the impact; not the surrounding consequences because only the “goal” (the what) matters. We focus on ‘what I want, what I want to accomplish, what job I want, what salary I want’ …what, what, what. And we spend very little time, if any on ‘who I want to become.’
Focusing on the ‘what’ creates the mentality of doing whatever it takes…damn the consequences…to reach that pre-determined ‘what.’ However, focusing on ‘who’ forces us to evaluate the impact those actions have to our very being. It forces us to evaluate the impact our choices have on others.
Doing well at work, reaching goals, earning promotions…there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with those activities. But the key difference is that these results must be by-products of the work you do on yourself, not the end goal like so many in the hustle-culture preach.
What if you do this work on yourself and you still aren’t a “rock-star” at work? So bloody what! You weren’t put on this earth to sell another prospect on 1-of-7,000 marketing platforms, nor to crush-KPIs nor make another 3,000 cold calls. You were put on this earth to become the best you that you can become and to enrich others around you.
Measure your life on the person you’re becoming, the relationships you forge and whether the person you became and the person you wanted to become will be happy to meet the other.
Don’t measure your life on some meaningless, made-up-KPI that your manager randomly assigned to you.
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