JUNE 22, 2020
After achieving your goals, don’t consider the fulfilment and the appreciation as the final achievement of life because with this achievement you have grown and you have pushed your limits further and presented yourself with a new opportunity to grow again and push your limits again, but exponentially this time…
-Prabhsimrat Gill
We all hear a lot that we should follow our dreams and we should achieve our goals, but do we hear about what comes after achieving our goals? We seldom do. Yes, making goals, working towards them and achieving them is important, but knowing what to do after achieving our goals is equally important.
The first step towards success is defining it for yourself, that is the goals you set. Then, in order to make your vision of success a reality, you plan out on how to do that. And finally, you work hard day by day towards your vision and when it does become true, when you have achieved success, you feel a great sense of fulfilment, you get appreciated by people, even by the ones who didn’t believe you. All of it ends well when you achieve it. The feeling of having the spotlight on ourselves and being rewarded and appreciated is great, but we can’t always be under the spotlight and be appreciated for the same thing again and again, can we?
After achieving the goals you’d set for yourself, your life won’t end there. By achieving a goal you have only unlocked a certain percentage more of the potential you have inside yourself. This means that by achieving a specific goal, you have expanded the number of things you are able to do in your life, which suggests that you have basically unlocked the potential you had by achieving your goal and pushing yourself further. Let me give you an example- Imagine that you always loved reading fictional books and you were very good at storytelling. You wrote many short stories and shared it with your close friends who always loved them. You felt that you should write a novel as you were good at making stories and you loved reading them yourself. The thought of writing a book started to seem very daunting to you. You thought to yourself, “I am good at writing short stories of probably 2-3 pages but writing a 200 page book isn’t possible for me at all!” You shared this idea gloomily with your friends who in turn encouraged you to take this chance. You started. You wrote a beginning like you normally do. You started adding many more dialogues and descriptions in your writing. You set out about 30-40 minutes a day for writing your novel and you just kept writing about half a page everyday. You did this continuously and after about 400 days, your novel of 200 pages was ready! You got it edited, you got it checked and read by your friends and you published it. Your book got great attention and appreciation from people and you felt truly happy and all that appreciation just seeped into you. You felt true gratitude towards your friends who supported your idea in the first place and you owe your success to their support. After this, you know that you have pushed your limit of capabilities further and you have expanded your potential of doing things. You have truly achieved greatness in your life, but then a question arises in your mind — “What now?”.
To answer the “What now?”, you need to look into yourself. Remember, you have only expanded your potential fractionally with your goal, not fully. So, the answer is, make new goals, achieve new things, and expand your potential further and further. You need to keep learning and keep the excitement burning all the time in your life. Your age can never decide when you can or cannot learn because no matter how old or young you are, learning will be omnipresent all the time. By learning new things and making new goals I don’t mean that you need to do something different by starting from the basics. You can keep learning and achieving in the field that interests you. It can even be the same field you achieved your goals in previously. You just need to keep setting the bar higher and higher and keep learning. Let’s look deeper into this by continuing with the example above- You have written a book and it has achieved great success, what do you do now? Well, if it interests you, write another book. Maybe a sequel to your first one or a new story altogether, but you will want to do this because you will want to go back to the spotlight again, you will want to be appreciated again and you will want to be grateful again, but this time on an exponentially higher level!
Always strive for learning, growth, happiness and fulfilment. No matter how much you have already achieved, learn more and achieve more. Also, even if the world doesn’t see or appreciate your success, if you know that you have achieved and grown exponentially, then you truly have. Dwelling, dreaming and living on the appreciation you get once for achieving your goals won’t take you to the greatness in life, but continuously and regularly keeping excitement and achievement a part of your life will definitely bring in the greatness you seek…