Your Inner CEO: Who's laughing now?

What's the the single greatest accomplishment of your career? It can be something you did for your company, or something you did for yourself, or maybe even something you did to outfox the competition.

To understand "greatest career accomplishment," let's pretend you're our old friend Bill Gates. Take a stroll through your 48,000 square foot home near Seattle, and ponder the question: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 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 the dominant throughout the world, and you, Bill Gates, were on your way to a net worth of more than sixty billion dollars.

Now let's pretend you're another of our old friends, the late Steve Jobs. As if it were the mirror image of Bill Gates' strategic ploy, your decision early on not to allow the licensing of your operating system was for many years regarded as one of the stupidest acts in the whole history of human commerce. And yet, as time passed and Apple eventually produced a whole line of blockbuster products, your proprietary move hugely paid off. Go figure!

Sometimes it's really hard to tell what works and what doesn't, if we look at a career simply from a profit-making point of view. So try looking at your greatest career achievement from a different angle. Instead of focusing on a 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 Bill Gates. Nations in Africa and Asia are receiving billions of dollars in medical and educational support. This may not be as luxurious as your big house on Lake Washington with its digitalized works of art, but it’s certainly something to be proud of.

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. it. Maybe it's something you did many years ago. Or maybe it's something you'll do today.