Your Inner CEO: "You're Bill Gates...."

Maybe your present occupation is exactly what you always wanted to do -- or you may be in a job or industry that you never expected to enter. You may be happy about what you’re doing, or you may be disappointed. But for the time being, let’s put all that aside. 

Without addressing any of the complexities of where you work or why you work there, try to identify the single best accomplishment of your career. It can be something you did for your employer, or something you did for yourself, or something you did to help one of your colleagues.

To understand this, imagine that you’re Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest people in the world. Take a stroll through your 48,000 square foot home near Seattle, and ponder the question we’ve just been discussing: what’s the best thing you’ve done in your work and career. 

In terms of business decision making, certainly one of your highlights was licensing your computer operating system to IBM for almost no money, provided you could retain the right to license the system to other computer manufacturers as well. IBM was happy to agree -- because after all, nobody would possibly want to compete with the most powerful company in the world, right? 

With that one decision, your system and your company became dominant throughout the world, and you, Bill Gates, were on your way to a net worth of more than sixty billion dollars.

Or maybe you’d like to look at your greatest career achievement from a different angle. Instead of focusing on the decision that helped you make so much money, maybe you’d like to look at the decision to give so much of it away. 

After all, no other person in history has become a philanthropist on the scale of you, Bill Gates. Nations in Africa and Asia are receiving billions of dollars in medical and educational support. This may not be as well publicized as your big house on Lake Washington with its digitalized works of art, but it’s certainly something to be proud of.

Now, back to reality. The process of determining your greatest career achievement is a very personal decision. It can be something obvious or it can be something very subtle. But it should make you proud of yourself when you think of. So take a moment, and then make your choice.