How do you feel about your own

accomplishments?

February 15, 2006

You will find a quote attributed to Leonardo daVinci if you click on the Philosophy Board link on the top of this page. "A man's success is measured not by his fame or fortune but by how he feels about his own accomplishments."

Leonardo amassed some 25,000 pages of notes in his personal journals. He never attempted to publish them. After his death they were distributed to several different people, including the Pope, who sought to suppress them. Many of his notes have been lost, and only about 15,000 of those pages are known to exist today.  

In the pages that survived, we see his designs for war machines, to include the prototype for the helicopter and the tank, along with his studies of human anatomy, still used by doctors to this day. And yes, he was a great artist, but some of his greatest works were unfinished. Some he was forced to abandon, like the statue of a great horse, others he abandoned because he lost interest. Others he worked on for many years, constantly changing and improving them.  

He worked on a single painting, the Mona Lisa, most of his life and only stopped painting it because he died. Leonardo, one of his biographers observed, believed that conceiving and planning a work of art was everything, executing it was servile. Whether conceiving or executing, however, Leonardo felt pretty good about his accomplishments.

I am certainly no Leonardo, but I take comfort in his philosophy. Having been an Army officer and a government civil servant for over 40 years, I've been a lot of places and I've done a lot of things. And, like Leonardo, I've left a paper trail--thousands of pages, most of which exist in government archives. But not all. I've written a novel and a screen play, I've published several articles on U.S.-China relations, and I've given a lot of speeches and written a lot of papers that are in the public domain. If you "Google" me you'll even find my testimony before the United States Congress.  

All things considered, I feel pretty good about my own accomplishments. It's not about comparing what you've done or haven't done to someone else. It's not about how historic or momentous what you said or did may or may not have been. It's simply how you feel about what you did at that given moment in time compared to what you believed you were supposed to be doing or you intended to do.

I doubt that Leonardo ever set out to actually build a helicopter or a tank. He understood all too well the limits of the technology of his time. He set out to explore a concept, an idea. He wanted to conceive and plan. He left the building of those things to others in another time and another place.  

Despite the fact he never built a helicopter or a tank, when he looked at his concept on paper, no doubt he felt good about that accomplishment. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon he intended to take Rome. He did, and it's clear from history that he felt good about that accomplishment. Which one felt better? Which accomplishment is more important? Those are questions for historians, not for individuals.

Every April, as the grass begins to turn green and the dogwoods begin to bloom, I go out in my yard, lay mulch around the trees, trim branches, put down fertilizer, and pull weeds. At the end of the day, before I go in the house, I stand on my deck and look out at my work. And I feel pretty good about my accomplishment.