Uncommonly Remarkable is a health and wellness show focused on understanding how the body works and how everyday choices shape long-term health. The show is published in two formats: authored monologues that explore core ideas around health, resilience, and human biology, and In Conversation episodes featuring long-form discussions with clinicians, scientists, and founders. Rather than chasing trends, the show focuses on systems, signals, and long-term trajectory. Hosted by Artis Beatty.
Success is often tied to a destination: a number, a goal, a title, a finish line.
But what happens when the destination keeps moving?
In this episode, I reflect on the way we measure progress, the trap of comparing ourselves to others, and how easy it is to overlook how far we’ve already come. Maybe success isn’t only found at the end of the journey. Maybe some of the clearest evidence is in who we are becoming along the way.
Uncommonly Remarkable℠ is a health and wellness show focused on understanding how the body works and how everyday choices shape long-term health.
I’m Artis Beatty, a doctor of optometry and Chief Medical Officer at MyEyeDr. While my professional background informs how I think, the perspectives shared here are my own.
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I was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine, and we were talking about success and what success looks like. And it easily translated to any kind of success in any program that you might be doing, whether that's how you look at physical success or career success or mental health success, whatever it might be, there tends to be some sort of measurement that you look at and say, I've achieved it. But the topic of our conversation was a little bit different in that it is sometimes very difficult to know what that destination is or what that measure should be. And quite often you can fail to achieve simply because you've decided to move the destination. And in our conversation, we started to really think about how do you measure the journey instead? Because the journey itself can actually be a great way to understand if you are achieving success without having to measure the endpoint. And so I thought today we would talk a little bit about how we look at ourselves or how we see ourselves and what it is that we should be thinking about as we go throughout our journey of life and try to achieve those things that we think or thought were relatively important, even if those things somewhat change as time goes on. When I think about myself as a example, I tend to be one of those folks that really does look to see if I'm achieving some metric or merit as I go along. And often I will set a target. I want to do this many of these things, or I want to do that better than I did before. And I try to measure myself against that previous person just to see if I can get there. Now, there's a couple of traps one can fall into. The first trap being comparing themselves to others who are doing similar or the same things. And I call that a trap because we all have different aptitudes and we all have different ability to do certain things or achieve certain goals or targets. And comparing yourself to someone else over time is usually a way to set yourself up for disappointment. If you happen to be doing something that you are comparing yourself against a person who is elite or an expert at, or someone who simply has a different or better aptitude for, that person may continue to improve or reach the target that they set for themselves, or an artificial one you set on their behalves much more quickly than you. And that leaves you feeling relatively disappointed in your inability to achieve. What's interesting about that is that when you speak with people who actually are elite or who do things on a scale that is beyond what we would consider to be typical, they often tell you that they never compare themselves to other people. The reality is that they compare themselves to themselves over and over again, measuring how well they do compared to the last time they tried to do that thing. And I think that's an important piece of having comfort with your ability and comfort with yourself is understanding that the biggest competitor should be you. And improving is certainly a sign of success. The second thing I think that is important is thinking about where those goals and targets come from and why you chose those. Quite often, I think we pick a goal or a target based on something we think someone else would want us to achieve. Or maybe it's based on what you perceive others wanting you or thinking you should achieve. And quite often, when you do that, it puts you in a position where you are likely to change that target or that goal based on changes in perception around those folks that may have artificially created it for you. And while that does mean that you are on a path for continuous improvement, it also means that you never really realize what you have achieved and what things have gotten better, worse, or stayed the same for you as you've been on the journey. And I think that in itself is something worth thinking about. If you're in a position where you can never actually feel as if you've gotten to the goal line, you are striving towards a goal that is unachievable. And that inability to achieve certainly can spur you to continue, but you never actually realize how far you've come. And I think to me, that's probably the worst of the traps. As I think about myself, I think that I am guilty of never actually looking to see how far I've come in a lot of regards relative to what I think I want to achieve. And in the conversation I had with my friend, it was very obvious that he could see that I've come a long way with a lot of the goals or targets or objectives that I wanted to achieve. And in many ways, have achieved each of those in their own right, only to find a way to move the target and make myself feel like I had not gotten there. And so part of my new thought and my new way of thinking is that I want to look at where I want to go, but I want to look at where I'm going at the same time. And maybe there are pieces of the journey itself that give you great joy if you're not always looking at the part of the journey that you would consider the end, the part where you have not and cannot achieve it. And so what that means to me is that as I'm going through project after project, or I'm looking to achieve thing after thing, I'm gonna look at the individual pieces and I'm gonna measure the success of those individual pieces, and I'm gonna look at where they're taking me. And I'm gonna be more excited and more diligent around celebrating the success of the journey itself and celebrating the comparison of previous me to current me, then I am gonna be focused on getting to the very end of a journey that I may or may never get. So this thought is all about understanding that we all are successful in our own right. We all have achieved a multitude of things, but we probably have achieved many more things than we give ourselves credit for because we don't always look at the journey that we're on. We aim for a destination that may or may never come, and we give up some of the small joys of understanding what it is that has made us great along the journey. This is uncommonly remarkable. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you in the next one.
