Yes, I mean this, for every goal. The catch here is how you measure success, how you define it. Inspiration for this blog post comes from reflecting on ancient Egypt. This was brought on during a recent visit to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I spent a little too much time in the Egyptian section.
We know so much about Egyptian culture from all the relics we find in tombs. Many museums that I have visited have some collections from ancient Egypt but I've never seen one as extensive as the collection at the MET. One that really caught my eye, and evoked the thoughts in this blog post, was a collection of models found in the Tomb of Meketre, from Dynasty 12, early reign of Amenemhat I (ca. 1981 -1975 B.C.) Discovering tombs like this one was basically opening time capsules that the ancient Egyptians created.
Their burial traditions were focused so much on preparing for the afterlife and having supplies for this afterlife. These models were made to ensure that the buried had everything they needed. Everyday items and life scenes were meticulously recreated. Their goal was to live on. From all that we see, they worked pretty hard to see this goal achieved.
Another interesting collection showing elaborate burial rituals included funerary jewelry from the three foreign wives of king Thutmose III. Shown above is a picture of one set, but in the museum, there were three very similar collections displayed side by side. They were found in a rock cut cave, high up in a desert mountain cliff, in western Thebes.
Here we are so many thousand years later, finding all the ancient Egyptians carefully packaged for the afterlife. At first glance it may seem that they failed. But they didn’t. All that hard work paid off. These people, in many ways, have been immortalized. In their goal of moving on to the next life, they successfully moved on and kept themselves relevant through multiple generations.
Lofty dreams propel us further than mediocre ones. Life happens and we can’t all be presidents, CEOs, or astronauts. But holding unto such dreams and working hard to achieve them will take us somewhere in its vicinity, even if we we don’t technically reach the goal we initially set our minds to. The time period when we worked hard to reach it already made us so much better. No amount of striving or hard-work is ever wasted. If you look back from where you are today and recognize how far you’ve come, you gain perspective, then you can redefine your goal and see that you have succeeded.
