Thoughts from the Summit
By: Deb Kloeppel, President and Founder
When we think about success, we tend to think about the flashy moments. The moments when you know you’ve got it right—and everyone else does too. These moments, though they may be fleeting, are more often not the motivation that sustains us on the road to getting to our mountain top. While we stand there, basking in the glow
of a job well done, a goal attained, we don’t need to think of the work, of the hustle it took to get there. Somehow, that work fades into the background, only to be taken up again as we chase our next big dream.
It’s not surprising that we don’t want to look back on the journey. True, sometimes we look back on our journey for the sake of nostalgia, but for the most part, we’d prefer to skip to the best part of the story—the part where we succeed, where everything works out.
We like to focus on the summit because the road to getting there often looks messy. It looks like long hours, late nights, failures in our relationships for the sake of chasing our dreams, the moments we got it all wrong and were humbled as we learned from our mistakes. The road can look like financial instability, hard choices, too many nights of eating takeout, and wondering if things were ever going to come out right. For every moment of deeply felt success, there’s an equally deep well of humility and self-doubt that a person must face.
These moments of fear, failure, and humility may not be where anyone else can see it, but they are there just the same. They are a part of any success story, be it success in your personal life, a job, in the job market, or running a nonprofit that helps military members and their affiliates…Do you see what I did there?
I'm putting all my eggs in one basket. I'm betting everything I've got on you."
~Irving Berlin
(made famous by Fred Astaire and also Ella Fitzgerald)