How do you track your successes?
Today I had a small accomplishment that involved solving something I was pondering in the back of my mind all day. In the moment (and even still, a couple hours later), I felt a sense of pride.
But I know that in another week I won't even remember this feeling. I'll have moved on to some other event in life and feel things associated with that.
Which leads me to my question - is there an effective way to save a record of your accomplishments that will keep or re-ignite that emotional/chemical response?
We can even extend this into work life a bit as well. If you use an issue tracker or ticketing system, I'd imagine your completed tickets are lost to the abyss unless they need to be searched for in the future.
Personally, I think a journal is too verbose. But I'm open to ideas.
Mine's kinda stupid, but I'm a big fan. Basically there's a shop near me that sells a bunch of random stickers. Every time I have a good day, or I accomplished something, I go and get a random sticker that catches my eye and stick it on my water bottle. I may not remember what all of them are for, or what they mean, but as it builds up over time it's really nice!
Basically you just gotta trick the 4 year old in your brain sometimes.
Not stupid at all! Sounds like a fun reminder.
Oh I love this!!
I might steal this!
Depends on what kind of cues trigger positive memories for you, I think.
I have physical momentos around the home and office and it's fantastic. Like @rungus' stickers, I have trinkets from games I've beaten without cheats, photos of me and my friends at hikes that I originally didn't want to go to, cute things purchased during especially memorable times of my life.... Cute things. The common thread is cute things. Like rungus, maybe I dont remember every single one but collectively they exude a sort of positive gestalt aura
Another one is soundtrack. On a week or longer trip I like getting a new album to listen to on loop. Whenever those songs come on the radio (lol showing my age), I'm transported to a specific age and location in time.
Another thing is having meeting reminders on my calendar app at anniversary of good moments, with photos tagged in the description. At each pop up occurence I can choose to archive them, or add a new photo for the next year.
Third thing is related to the second: sit down with a good friend/partner and just go through old photos together, maybe start a milestone/achievement folder. Spend a couple hours sharing what you remember to reinforce and add their perspective to the memory.
I like this idea for medium to large accomplishments. But I'm referring to even smaller ones! My example from yesterday is doing a very simple modification of a headphone hanger I bought to clamp to my desk. Sure, I'll see it there and maybe think about it for the next week, but then it just becomes normal, and nothing I'll think hard about.
sticker in a sticker book haha :D that's what we used to do for minor accomplishments like pacticed for 30 minutes before piano lessons or learning one more character in language class: sticker in a sticker book.
I don't take a lot of pictures with my phone but when I do something along those lines I try to remember to take a picture, that way I have record that I did a thing. Like a scrapbook but even easier. You could even make accomplishment pictures their own folder if you needed them to not get scrambled amongst normal pics.
Awesome idea! Maybe I'll do that. Quick and simple.
From a professional perspective, I plan out what great looks like, and each quarter I review that with my team. At the end of the year, we go back and it's a great feeling to see how much we actually accomplished.
From a personal perspective, I do the same thing, but with a five year horizon. I list out big goals, little accomplishments, cool things I want to try.
The last thing I really try to do, is to catch others doing really well. My employees, my family, my friends.
the only success I have found was the birth of my daughter. Everything else it’s just part of the journey of life.
My brain likes checking off lists. Anytime I accomplish something around the house and can check it off my list that's good enough for me.
Professionally I keep a brag sheet. It's just a Google sheet where I track anything I accomplish no matter how big or small. Then l can easily recall what I accomplished big or small for my next TB or my year end review.