In a recent discussion with a peer mentor, I happened to mention that I felt stuck. I was not achieving, while others seem to be moving forward and progressing. His comeback was that accomplishing is different from achievement.
I was struck by the truth of this and began to unravel it some more. I found that we often make the mistake of confusing achievement and accomplishment, since we tend to consider both in the same sense. As per sources, achievement is a goal that has been reached while accomplishment is a job or project that has been completed.
Achievement vs Accomplishment
Achievement typically is a measure of an externally imposed standard, whereas accomplishment typically describes an internally motivated goal. Achievement is formal and public, as it has an external reward – praise, etc. Accomplishment is, on the other hand, a sense of satisfaction for which there’s no public acknowledgment or an external reward. It’s a personal task completed, a joy which you experience by yourself, informal and internal.
Achievements are associated with success, recognition, and reaching a certain objective or milestone. They can be both tangible and intangible, such as winning a competition, earning a degree, or overcoming a personal challenge, etc.
Accomplishments encompass a whole range of activities or tasks that have been completed. They can be both major and minor tasks, routine activities, and personal goals. Accomplishments are related to various aspects of life, such as work, education, hobbies, or personal development. They refer to a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction derived from completing tasks, whether or not they are widely recognized or significant in the eyes of others.
In a nutshell, while both “achievement” and “accomplishment” refer to the successful completion of tasks or goals, the former often implies a specific, notable, and sometimes externally recognized success. The latter is a more general term that cover a wide range of successfully completed activities and tasks, including those of a personal or everyday nature.
Life’s Patterns
It is, therefore, clear that achievements are more external and quantifiable, whereas accomplishments are more internal and qualifiable. This fundamental difference ought to help us as we go through various times and seasons of life.
There will be times in our life when we may not, or even cannot, see hard evidence of blessings, success and progress. There’ll be times when there seems to be a deadness or a mundanity or a placid sameness to our existence. Nothing new or exciting is taking place, and everything seems to be just a routine of daily tasks and normal activities.
At such times or seasons, there will be a tendency to initiate or push through or start something new so as to bring back some concrete evidence or achievements into being. The problem with such workaholic or insecure mentality and activity is that it doesn’t allow you to renew, refresh and restore yourself. Result will be running your life on fumes or empty tank rather than on fuel and a full tank of energy!
*Pic courtesy of DEAD Leader Running by Wayne Cordeiro
Adrenaline Rush
Years ago I heard Wayne Cordeiro talk on Dead Leader Running and it was quite an insight. He talks about how when we go beyond the limits of our energy, we end up working on adrenaline. Adrenaline is the rush of energy we get in emergencies and crises that help us act or react as needed. This will enable us to deal with the situation and then relax after it the pressure is gone. Such as a man who is able to jump out and push his car back onto the highway when he ended up in a ditch while driving his wife to the hospital as she is having birth pangs. Later, when his incredulous friends do not believe, he is unable to do the same and prove it to them. Thus, we will be able to do seemingly superhuman acts that we cannot after the crisis.
Tendency to work on adrenaline will cause wear and tear of your body, especially when it is your continuous habit or your lifestyle. Epinephrine (adrenaline), cortisol, and norepinephrine are hormones designed to help us deal with stressful situations by increasing our heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels. When these are produced constantly, we cannot maintain a healthy quality of life.
When achievements and external goals are your main focus or your only outcomes, then you will be prone to constant stress situations. You will then be prone to heart attacks, high blood sugar, develop blood pressure, as well as other complaints. Accomplishments, with their focus on inward satisfaction, maybe invisible and internal, but produce the needed balance in life. Such satisfaction will trigger Serotonin, which is associated with happiness, focus and calmness, will help keep your body in health.
Nature’s Rhythm
Nature demonstrates to us the maintaining of such equilibrium in various ways and means. It goes through the rhythm of spring, summer, autumn, and winter when the earth and all vegetation take a break after a intense production cycle. Animals hibernate to rest awhile before resuming active life. The caterpillar shuts itself up in a cocoon to develop wings. The waxing and waning of moon, tides, wind patterns, all reveal the stability of nature. Man and woman alone seem to be the ones who do not understand and live by this cycle of existence.
Our daily life actually follows the sequence of night and day, rest and activity that our bodies need to maintain optimum condition. Our ages go through a growth and decline to enable us to know when to work, when to rest, when to take it easy. Our emotions, our minds, and our will need to adjust to this cycle. Birth, growth, death, all showcase a rising and downing of everything that has life.
One can’t live on highs and not have lows, go through peaks and not have valleys, feel droughts and not know floods. An up is invariably followed by a low, a sweet by a bitter, and a dawn by a dusk. The water that comes down as rain goes back up as vapor, thereby ensuring the progress and passage of life through time!
Weather the Season Well
People today seem to be intent on getting a rush or living by a rush or seeking a high or a hype. There is such a frenzy and hurry to acquire anything and everything, quickly and before everyone else. Folks run after sales, afraid to miss a deal, wanting to get things done fast or ahead of others. There is a lack of waiting to get things done, or the right thing for everything to happen. They push their children to peak before their time, causing them to miss their childhood. Kids are made to enter the rat race too early in life through shows and competitions, or other means of projection and promotion.
Every aspect of life has its seasons, times and terms, each with its own progress and growth. Take away a season and you will end up with a disaster, both natural and otherwise. Each flower has its own season of growth, bloom, and fading away; each tree has a time to grow, flower, produce, and die; each fauna has its own space for birth, growth, produce, and reproduce. Take away one portion of this cycle, or erase and try to quicken this process, you will create an anomaly or a grotesque creature.
A caterpillar must spend enough time in a cocoon to become a butterfly, a baby remain three hundred days in the womb to be healthy, a full year needs its season for life to sustain in every sphere. So also, we go through times of high achievement followed by seasons of rest or relaxation. This is needed to refresh, recoup and be ready for the next frenzy of work. Shorten or skim or skip this portion, and you are likely to end up with ill-health, burnout, and mental fatigue. Night and day, sleep and work, have been given to us to weather our life well, and not check out too soon from life!
Understand your season and live well
Seasons of achievement and accomplishment will alternate in our lives, and it is our look out to understand the season to not be lost. High achievers do not understand the periods of accomplishment is the rule of the day. Accomplishment periods are not understood since they don’t have attending fanfare or a major happening to account for at the end of the day.
These are periods when quiet day-to-day activities seem to fill the day, but truly a time when even a small chore adds to up to a total of a whole. It might be as simple as playing with children, or talking to your spouse, or going for a walk, or reading a book, or even enjoying the dusk while seated on your terrace or portico. It could be doing the dishes, taking the kids for an ice cream, calling your parents, visiting a friend, camping with family, or simply sleeping or counting your blessings. Each of these may not seem to be an achievement where some goal or target is reached, but they will help you accomplish, invisibly and quietly. When this season ends, you may not be able to tally up points, but you will have a sense of wellbeing, a confidence born of peaceful meditation, a wiping out of past and starting afresh, a new perspective as well as a new joy that wells up to help you weather your next season of intense activity.
You would have stored up a residue of strength, a revenue of good will, and banked up stamina for what is ahead. You would have had wiped your slate clean of of past hurts, received or caused, and will arise as a phoenix, with newness of life and outlook.
Productivity can become an idol, and we will be its slave if we do not understand that we more than what we produce. In the Bible, God mandated the sabbath for healthy living and sound or stable family and community existence.
Sabbath rest is important for us to be wholistically well and realistically achievers, and we will do well to alternate achievement with accomplishment!
MULLINGSPICE 