What have you achieved lately?

I usually sit down once every year to reflect on achievements and lessons learned the past year. It can be things that have been ongoing in my profession or in private life.

For example I managed a fairly large project which had a member of the steering committee that was always taking every chance to hinder progress. I became very frustrated with his objections and comments. It came to a point were I was feeling really bad and thought that I cannot lead projects. In that situation I consulted a former project manager colleague and we discussed what needs to be done in order to solve the issue at hand. We concluded that I had to think about his perspective and identify the information he needed. Of course one would like an executive manager to be able to pick the information he needed or if he misses some information be able to articulate that and ask for it. Also we concluded that I should try not to be to focused on what he said and didn't say. Of course all what this manager did was example of bad management, but I could choose between make my own career great or be a victim for the circumstance.

Anyway, in this process I also reflected upon the fact that I couldn't figure this out myself as others had already done before me. I mean there are people who seem to know already from the beginning what to do in a certain situation. It looks like it is embedded in their genes. Take Mozart as an example. He played better violin at age 4 than most people do after a whole life in training. How can this be possible? Is it only pure intelligence or is it something else? I don't really know to be honest, but I found an interesting article on Wired called What kind of genius are you?. In the article he concludes that there are two types of geniuses. One that sees from the beginning what shall be done and the rest is only implementation. Get it done basically. The second genius is the one that is developed over time. You make a move, take in the rest and improves the actions from the collected feedback. Personally I am a fond of the second type for two reasons. The first is of course that since I haven't done anything that will give me the Nobel Prize yet I have to trust that I will actually learn from my experience. The second reason is more compelling since it says that people can develop new skills over time and learn from them. In the end this is the most interesting since it will enable all of us normal people to actually develop some skills. We're not left with our starting ability to create great stuff, we can improve it! Actually I admire people more who have learned from past lessons than who trusts only the default skill set.

If you are interested about this I can also advice you of a recent article in Harvard Business Review called Discovering your authentic leadership.

The conclusion of this post is to urge you to reflect on your achievements. This is the only way to improve if your not born with an extraordinary ability. It is also the only way to develop your authentic leadership. So by reflecting over yourself you will by itself achieve new exciting things.