The Retrospective

It is that time of the year yet again.

Days have rolled into months and now you have just rung down the curtain on the past year and welcomed the new year.

This has far more implications than merely wishing friends and family good wishes for the new year.

And then forget about the one that has just ended.

It is the perfect time for a look back at the year gone by.

A retrospective is not merely a chronological review of days passed.

It is an opportunity to:

• list your achievements,
• examine your mistakes,
• take stock of lessons learned and
• course correct.

Year end retrospectives are not a passive post mortem of days gone by.

It is a rich tapestry of:

• what you did well and not so well, 
• what events were life changing, 
• who you will thank and be grateful to, 
• how it will prepare you for the new year unfolding.

Napoleon Hill, the author of the all time classic "Think and Grow Rich" used to say:

"If you keep doing what you have always been doing, you will keep getting what you have always gotten."

So, a retrospective is a scorecard, so to say, of life. 

A scorecard which has positives and negatives.

The difference being that negatives are opportunities to turn into positives.

And not merely indications of your failure and something you can beat yourself up for. 

The human is a being on an incessant quest for meaning and purpose.

Failures are an integral part of that journey. 

The retrospective is a tool for an assessment of that quest.

Your Achievements

By reason of being a human you have a "why" element to life that makes you different from the animal world.

You are able to reason.

In the same vein, you are able to motivate yourself and aim higher and be more happy and successful.

Nothing motivates you more than in realizing that there a lot of facets of your life where you have been successful.

You have achievements that you are proud of.

Or are you?

One of the unerring truths of life is that despite all the positives that you can enumerate, a human is often susceptible to focusing on negatives.

In photography, we have a quote that mirrors life: "A negative is something developed in a dark room."

Your achievements are the fulcrum of your future endeavors.

They inspire you, galvanize you and help your remain upbeat.

And most critically, acknowledging your own achievements is no self aggrandizement.

Your main objective in celebrating your achievements is key to personal growth.

Nothing succeeds like success.

Success begets success.

What can you rate as your achievements?

Well, anything where you have put in extraordinary effort.

Note that I say "effort."

It is not merely results that can be chronicled as a personal achievement.

Efforts are too.

Thomas Edison the greatest inventor of all time is said to have made 10,000 attempts at inventing the incandescent bulb (the one that literally shines in your daily life).

If he had felt that his 10,000 attempts were not achievements, he would never have made that fateful next attempt.

That was when he indeed produced results and tasted success.

Efforts are stepping stones to results and success.

They are therefore as much achievements on a personal level as anything else.

Your lack of apparent achievement could be because of what you consider an achievement.

Go on, give it a shot.

For this new year 2023, resolve to rate as achievement where you have invested sincere effort and time towards a goal or a life mission.

It is therapeutic to say the least and life changing at its best.

Your Mistakes

Mistakes always get bad press.

They are reviled and even scorned.

However, it is often said  and true that if you are not making mistakes you are not trying hard enough.

Mistakes are part and parcel of personal growth as much as achievements are.

In fact, you can hardly make a worthwhile effort without a few mistakes along the way.

Mistakes indicate that you are stretching and not remaining stationary.

Your Lessons Learned

An umbilical cord connection to mistakes are lessons learned.

We said earlier that mistakes are integral to personal growth.

That journey is not complete unless you picked up some lessons along the way for your mistakes.

Nothing is more reflective of being in inertia than repeating your mistakes.

Not learning lessons from your mistakes is more damaging than the mistakes themselves.

Napoleon Hill (yes, that bloke again) used to say: "There is a seed of equivalent if not more benefit from a failure or a mistake."

Mistakes indicate that you are stretching, going outside your comfort zone.

You are treading new paths.

This is a sure sign of being on the road to progress although you may be met with disappointments initially.

It is getting past that zone of despair that is key.

Continue striving.

Rome was not built in a day.

Neither will accomplishments come easily.

However, the lesson to be learned is to discover what went wrong and correct it.

You will be stronger in spirit for that.

Your Year Ahead

However, in all these facets of a retrospective, there is a transformational one.

This is the manner in which you look ahead to the new year.

Do you approach it: "one more year to endure," or "a year to take firm action and grow."

The approach you adopt will decide your future.

Destiny is a strange thing.

When it encounters:

• a committed mind able to harness past achievements,
• lessons learned from mistakes made and
• a resolve to forge ahead,

it seems to conspire to create what you imagined or planned for.

Go on, put it to practice.

It is unerring.

Let Me Leave You With This Thought

You cannot do anything about the 365 days that have rolled past.

But you can certainly influence the 365 that are in front of you.

How you ask?

By a resolve to grow personally, become a lifelong learner.

If you do look back on retrospective, it is only to provide momentum to your future.

There, you can virtually go design your own destiny!

See you on the other side (I mean the achievement side of course!).