“On the way to a grand goal, celebrate the smallest victories as if each one were the final goal. That way, no matter where it ends, you are victorious.” – from Excellent Advice for Living
I believe in celebrating small things. I am a big “smell the roses” and “celebrate your success” even if the bigger part of the success feels like a failure. If I deliver a good demo in a talk, or one of my players makes a good hit/pass/etc., let’s celebrate that. If the rest of the talk wasn’t smooth and people are confused, or we kept hitting the ball in the net, that’s a bit of a failure and something to work on.
There’s always a bright side and a dim side. One is likely larger, but both are there.
I think if we look at something in black and white terms, and reduce it to success or failure, then you create a psychology that you win or something wasn’t worth doing. The sports teams, the musicians, the friends I have, my kids, we aren’t defined by whether we win every time. We can’t be the best all the time.
Even the best of the best isn’t the best most of the time. Tom Brady (7 rings) and Michael Jordan (6 rings) might be considered the best at what they did. However, they played more years (Brady 23, Jordan 15). Were they failures those other years?
The Beatles had 19 #1 albums, the most of all time. However, they released more. They had lots of #1 songs, but plenty that didn’t get to #1. Were those not worth doing?
Celebrate your success. You might write a great query, but ultimately there are plenty others that don’t perform well or some might even return the wrong results. Hopefully you’ll fix and improve those, but celebrate the things that go well.
Work on those that don’t and turn them into victories later.
I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.
To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.