Most Accomplishments Are Invisible

That says a lot about society, and nothing about you. Rest assured that many millions of us know the immense value of changing your inner world, or even just surviving it, because we’re doing it quietly alongside you. Most of what the human world accomplishes on any given day is very hard to see.

So if you feel inadequate whenever some form of the “achievement Olympics” comes up, don’t. We live in a society that assesses people by what their lives produce, not what it takes to live them. Inner work is ignored unless it explains some outer work.

The words accomplishment and achievement usually signify conspicuous, outwardly-visible gains, often ones that come with status and material rewards. Do an image search for either word and it’s all grad ceremonies, sports medals, boardroom handshakes, and people standing on mountains. But there’s so much more being achieved in the human world.

One wonderful example is Morgan Housel’s article Overcoming Your Demons, in which he describes the inner experience of having a lifelong stuttering problem. He shared some of what it feels like—to know the word you need to say, but for its sound to be gone from the mind—and some of the many mental tactics he had to discover in order to manage it.

Presumably, most human challenges and triumphs are of just that sort: unseen, unsexy, and unrelatable to almost everyone else, which is why they don’t really come up when we talk about achievement. But it’s all real work, and it must be done. No extra time is given to accomplish it. There’s no instruction or training, and often no support. It’s tha... See more