I recently visited a dear friend at her newly finished home—a home that stood on a perch with 360º views of glorious California wine country, replete with red-tailed hawks soaring in front of us as though right on cue—and I said these words to her:

“Do you ever just stand out here at sunset and say, ‘we made it’?”

(*Insert the record scratch sound*)

The way she looked at me could best be described as one part befuddled, two parts horrified, and six parts “I’m reconsidering our friendship.”

“Of course not!” was her immediate answer.

My compliment-buried-within-an-obnoxious-question went over like a lead balloon, sure—and thankfully we just moved past it and poured more pinot noir. But it got me thinking …

• Does seeing that you’ve made it make you feel like you’ll jinx the rest of your Master Success Plan?
• Does thinking you’ve made it mean you’re giving up on future dreams and goals, because you’ve checked the box on “Success”?
• Does acknowledging that you’ve made it mean you’re going to put your feet up and have a smoke?
• Does saying you’ve made it (even under your breath to yourself) make you feel boastful … a bit too self-congratulatory and who deserves that??
• Does uttering you’ve made it communicate that you’re proud of yourself, and you were always taught pride comes before the fall?
• Does agreeing that you’ve made it feel too final—because you still have Stuff To Accomplish?
• Something else ?

I agree it can be a squeamish phrase, to say “I’ve made it,” because it’s tainted with our deep-seated ideas about what success even means and more troublingly what ~acknowledging~ that success means.

Most of us underappreciate ourselves, and not just in front of people when we awkwardly defer compliments or when we over-share credit to the team or when we bashfully downplay accolades that we’ve absolutely earned. It’s the inward underappreciation that might be the most uh-oh-y, because if we aren’t our own cheer-iest cheerleaders, then who else is patting us on the back?

What does it mean to make it? And when will we know if we have made it?

Let’s tackle the whole “internal vs. external perceptions of success” topic, straightaway. I might think you’ve made it and you might think you’re only 74% of the way there. Your neighbor might think he has “ROCKED IT” (with a gratuitous amount of fist pumps), while you look at his life with barely concealed pity (and annoyance, by the sounds of it what with all the self-affirmative body language). Sure, outside opinions can help shape our own views of ourselves, but at the end of the day it’s how we think/ feel about our own “making-it-ness.” My friend might be flattered that I assessed her life as being “made,” but she’s the one gauging her success in real time with the hawks. (Oh but the hawk was so beautiful!)

What if we recalibrated what “making it” meant? What if it wasn’t an all-encompassing notion that signaled the culmination of a triumphant era, but was rather a discreet, “I made it with respect to abc and now I am excited to make it in the xyz realm”?

What if we assessed our success in smaller, more manageable chunks, and owned it? What if we said, “I’ve made it” (even if it’s just whispering it in the mirror or writing it in a tiny font in a journal) and reveling in the glow of achievement? Isn’t it that warm glow the incubator we need to achieve Even More Success?

Dear god, so many questions.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is an old management maxim, and don’t worry—I’m not suggesting you read more Peter Drucker-isms or compute your success on a spreadsheet (unless those things delight you to no end). I’m thinking more like, “you can’t celebrate yourself when you aren’t aware you’ve done something worth celebrating,” which sure does have a catchy ring to it.

It’s hard to say “I’ve made it” with ill-defined goals. If we are clear that we want to be the Assistant Manager of Cinnabon and run a half marathon by the end of the year, and we do that, well then have we not made it? Made that? If we want to launch a start up and get a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, then can we not revel in the glory of making that? If, like in my case, The Husband and I wanted to move somewhere warm and have margaritas by a pool in the afternoons, and we find ourselves having made that happen, can we not cheers our plastic-by-the-pool glasses and say, “we made it”? Or at least, we made this?

When we haven’t made it

I’m aware that all this talk about acknowledging our feats ‘n glories hasn’t left room for the distinct discomfort of not making it.

So often we find ourselves absolutely not making it, and that’s a feature of being striving, hopeful, fallible humans, is it not? I’ve sang the “I’m not where I want to be” blues (I’ve got that tune in my head now, as a matter of fact *sigh*), and this business of not being there yet (please don’t miss the optimistic energy of “yet”) is worth talking about … just not today. Today’s about celebrating the good stuff—looking at your life from a mile above ground and seeing how far you’ve really come … all your wondrous wins and all your tiny triumphs.

And because I need to bring the topic of mortality into our conversation (I waited like 700 words to do so and now I’m getting itchy), how great will it be to get to the end and say from our morphine-soaked deathbeds, “I made it”? Let’s keep earning the right to say that, and let’s keep making sure we acknowledge what it is we’ve made along the way. And just like Mary Tyler Moore, let’s throw our hats up in the air in the middle of a downtown street, because, well, we’re just so darned excited about making something.