Amazing What You Can Accomplish-Daily Meditation 10.20.22
Today’s quotation:
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.-Harry S. Truman
Today’s Meditation:
Taking credit for things very often seems to require a lot of effort, doesn’t it? And sometimes we “need” to make sure that someone else doesn’t take credit for something that we’ve done, don’t we? Or do we? What would happen if we were just to accomplish the things we wish to accomplish without worrying about who got credit for them? What if it didn’t matter one bit to us whether we were given credit or not? What would our accomplishments look like?
My hunch is that they’d increase rather dramatically. If we don’t worry about being recognized for our contributions, then we also won’t worry too much about following up on our accomplishments to see who’s been affected by them, and the time and energy that we won’t spend making sure that what we did was noticed and appreciated can be spent on something new, something different, something beneficial to someone else.
Getting credit is nice. It’s wonderful to feel appreciated and to have other people recognize our achievements. But our achievements are the results of gifts that we’ve been given, so we have to keep in mind that we are fortunate to have been blessed with such gifts. And wanting recognition is to saddle ourselves with expectations–and these expectations may not be met, which can bring us down.
Of course, we don’t want someone else always taking credit for what we’ve done, but what’s wrong with accomplishing something and not worrying a bit about who gets the credit? When we don’t worry, we can move straight on to the next things in our lives, and fully enjoy doing so.
Questions to consider on What You Can Accomplish:
How do you feel when you don’t get the credit you “deserve”? Where do those feelings come from?
What kinds of images do we show of ourselves if we always insist on getting credit for every little thing that we do?
Why do we value so strongly the idea of “giving credit where credit is due”?
For further thought:
Keep in mind that letting go isn’t the end of the world, it’s the beginning of a new life.-unattributed
