When your life is about making the next promotion, selling the next big contract, buying a nicer home or whatever, then it is relatively easy to measure your progress.  Life is like a race and you can see those you are competing against falling behind you in your rear-view mirror.  Your progress up the corporate ladder is marked by bigger offices, grade rises, nicer cars, better parking spaces etc.

However, what happens if you see Life as a journey?  How do you measure progress then?  By the time on the road?  By the number places visited?  By  the nature and type of experiences you have encountered?  The thing is sometimes, as many of us know, apparent reversals in fortune can often be doors that you walk through into new and better places.  I know many people who are made redundant (apparently a bad thing) only to discover  something far better on the other side of this experience.

This lack of an easy way to measure progress is a real issue in times when you are feeling tired or dispirited.  All that hard work is easy to feel good about when can look over your shoulder and see all that you have achieved; much tougher when you aren’t able to label it.

I’d be really interested to know how you cope with this dilemma and whether there are good strategies to help with this or if it is just a feature of the journey…

“The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavour — property, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible.”   Albert Einstein