My Six Word Memoir
May 8th, 2008 by Michael KwanYou may have noticed that I talk a fair bit here about personal development, handling stress, and that kind of thing. It seems that I’m not alone in trying to understand life a little better, because I got tagged by Derek Semmler for the Six Word Memoir meme. He was tagged by Shawn Knight and now he is passing it on to me.
The idea is that you are supposed to come up a great piece of wisdom, summed up in just six words. It could be about money, family, success, or any other aspect of life that you feel is important. For Derek, he decided that his six word memoir would be “Plan for tomorrow, live for today.” He now understands that life is all about balance. If all you do is live for today, you’ll throw all your money away and leave yourself with tons of debt and no retirement. If all you do is plan for tomorrow, you’ll be far too frugal and forget about living in the now. The key is to be able to balance both.
I’ve given my six word memoir a fair bit of thought, because it could be remembered as the single greatest piece of advice expounded on this blog. Many of these potential memoirs didn’t quite make the cut, but I’ll probably still write on them some time in the future anyways. For now, I’m going to say that my six word memoir is:
Take Pride, Pleasure in Little Things
When we are striving for success, setting the bar high with our specific goals, we all too often forget to take pride in the little accomplishments that we have along the way. It’s far too easy to dismiss the small victories, because our eyes are always focused on the big prize.
Think about Olympic athletes, for example. They train for years so that they can compete on the international stage. They tell themselves that nothing short of a gold medal is good enough. As cliche as it may sound, just making it onto the Olympic team is a pretty formidable achievement already and it’s one that should be celebrated. The same can be said about trying to make money online, starting your business, or buying your first home.
Be mindful of the little things, because it’s the little things that make life worthwhile. If you’re trying to make money from your blog, getting your first AdSense cheque from Google is richly rewarding and should be celebrated. It may only be $100 and that’s not going to help you much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a monumental milestone. And you should be proud of that.
What’s Your Six Word Memoir?
As is the nature of memes, it’s time for me to pass the baton onto a few other individuals. Before I get to that, let me lay out the rules:
- Write your own six word memoir.
- Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you want.
- Link to the person who tagged you in your post.
- Tag at least five more blogs.
- Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.
And the five people that I am tagging are:
- Stephen Fung
- Brian Clark (Copyblogger)
- Damien Riley
- Israel Lagares (Fat Man Unleashed)
- Sharon Hurley Hall
Consider yourself tagged. Now come up with something memorable!
Filed under Personal Development.
Very nicely done Michael. You are absolutely correct that we often get caught up in the desire to keep doing better that we forget to enjoy the success that we have already achieved.
The beauty of the little things is that over time they all begin to add up and eventually become very big things.
Nice job Michael. I was actually going to tag you in mine, but I didn’t figure you would participate hehe.
Excellent article.
Good stuff, Dereks 6 words are actually how I live my life, but that’s already taken. I will get something up soon…
I like your phrase a lot. I’m not doing memes much lately due to my focus on a psychology/inspiration bent, but this one is kind of up that alley so we’ll see. Meanwhile, thanks for the link and i will see what I can think of! How about a 6 syllable aphorism?
Easy come, easy go
Congratulations. Those words maybe short but its a lot of meaning and eyeopener to some us:)
You decide if you will succeed.
What that means to me is that the choice of success and failure is up to us. Regardless of circumstance, take stock of your situation and move forward. Take pride in the small things you accomplish, and continue to take steps forward. You decide if you will succeed.
[...] limit at that point, but start with baby steps (as my friend Michael Kwan said in his post “My Six Word Memoir“, “Take Pride, Pleasure in Little [...]
[...] three word memoir if I had to have one right this second. So what’s the point of this? Well, Michael Kwan of Beyond the Rhetoric tagged me with his Six Word Memoir post. By tagging me he was essentially asking me to post my own [...]
Sorry it’s taken me so long; I’ve posted it on my other blog.