Achievements are the building blocks that enable someone to construct a sense of themselves as a success. The achievements that matter most combine to form a version of success that has meaning and substance for the individual. Achievements also provide tangible evidence that colleagues, competitors and the wider world use to judge a person as more or less successful.
Different people find different evidence compelling, so it is no surprise that there was variance in the achievements that were seen to hold greatest weight for women at Cambridge. There was also a recognition that achievements could be ephemeral, highly personal and evolve over time or in relation to context. Nonetheless, clear patterns did emerge. These patterns, which are outlined below, point to potential mismatches between the achievements that are traditionally viewed as markers of success and the ones that participants valued the most. As such they indicate areas that organisations might want to consider if they are interested in developing a more sophisticated and gender-inclusive sense of what it means to be successful.
Life is full of special moments and accomplishments that inspire pride and evoke profound joy While achievements often focus on major milestones like career success, financial goals, academic excellence and athletic triumphs, it’s also important to appreciate the small wins.
The truth is that achievements come in all shapes and sizes. Some are defined by tangible external results, while others center around internal growth, self-discovery and wellness. No matter how big or small, each accomplishment along life’s winding journey is worth celebrating.
Here are 23 inspiring examples of achievements that can enrich your life and bring a deeply satisfying sense of fulfillment
Career and Education Achievements
- Learning new job skills and sharpening your professional abilities
- Receiving a promotion or pay raise at your workplace
- Landing your dream job or starting a new career path
- Successfully changing careers or industries
- Completing an intense course or earning a new certification
- Graduating from high school, college, graduate school or a specialized program
- Starting your own business, freelance venture or side hustle
Health and Fitness Achievements
- Making exercise a consistent habit through commitment and discipline
- Running your first 5K, 10K or half marathon event
- Reaching a major fitness milestone like deadlifting 200 lbs
- Adopting a nutritious diet filled with whole foods to nourish your body
- Overcoming disordered eating patterns and developing a healthy relationship with food
- Abstaining from harmful substances like smoking, drugs or excessive alcohol
- Cultivating inner peace through meditation, breathwork and mindfulness
Financial and Home Achievements
- Hitting a net worth milestone or specific savings goal
- Paying off credit card or student loan debt
- Buying your first car or home
- Refinancing or upgrading your home
- Investing in retirement accounts like a 401(k) or Roth IRA
- Building an emergency fund with 3-6 months of living expenses
- Reducing unnecessary expenses and establishing a budget
Relationship and Family Achievements
- Developing healthy communication and increasing intimacy in your romantic relationship
- Ending an unhealthy or abusive relationship to prioritize your well-being
- Making new friends who uplift and inspire you
- Reconnecting with friends and family you’ve lost touch with over the years
- Planning a bucket list trip or vacation with your closest companions
- Getting engaged or married to your beloved partner
- Welcoming a baby or adopting a child to start a family
Personal Growth Achievements
- Letting go of limiting beliefs through introspection and self-discovery
- Overcoming challenging life circumstances and developing resilience
- Volunteering to support a cause dear to your heart
- Learning and practicing mindfulness to become more present
- Reading books to expand your knowledge and perspective
- Traveling somewhere new to gain world experience and cultural awareness
- Pushing outside your comfort zone to gain confidence and self-assurance
Creative Achievements
- Taking up a new hobby like photography, pottery or painting
- Learning to play an instrument like guitar, piano or violin
- Writing poems, stories or journal entries for self-expression
- Singing or performing in front of an audience
- Launching a blog, Youtube channel or podcast to showcase your talents
- Selling your handmade crafts, artwork or clothing designs
- Decorating or renovating your living space to reflect your unique style
Adventure Achievements
- Completing an adrenaline-pumping experience like skydiving or bungee jumping
- Pushing your physical limits by climbing a mountain or hiking across rugged terrain
- Embarking on a life-changing solo trip or backpacking adventure
- Road tripping cross-country to discover new places and experience freedom
- Camping out under the stars and disconnecting from technology
- Trying a thrilling new activity like surfing, rock climbing or kayaking
- Traveling internationally to step outside your cultural comfort zone
Life is an ever-unfolding journey of growth, discovery and transformation. While society often emphasizes major external achievements like career advancement, material success and prestige, true fulfillment emerges from self-acceptance, inner peace, mindfulness, close relationships and making a positive impact.
By appreciating the small triumphs along the way, you cultivate profound gratitude for each step forward, whether incremental or monumental. Your list of achievements tells the story of your life – so make each chapter count by living authentically and courageously.
Why Achievements Matter
Accomplishments and achievements serve many purposes across the span of our lives. Beyond tangible results like diplomas, pay raises and trophies, achievements show us what we’re capable of. They provide evidence of growth, allowing us to look back with pride on all we’ve overcome.
Achievements also motivate us to dream bigger and challenge ourselves. Hitting milestones fuels self-confidence to try new things and continue striving. Moreover, achievements give us credibility and respect from peers. Demonstrating expertise or talent in a particular area earns admiration and trust.
On a deeper level, achievements reinforce our sense of purpose. Making progress and seeing results provides meaning when life feels mundane. Whether starting a company, learning an instrument or raising children, accomplishments anchor us in what matters most. They remind us of our priorities and deepest human need for self-actualization.
Though cultures overlay achievement with status, true fulfillment stems not from admiration, but from living authentically, evolving into our best selves, and making a difference for others. Accomplishments signify growth, and growth is the essence of being human.
Examples of Small Yet Meaningful Achievements
Major milestones like graduations, weddings and new babies represent huge accomplishments worth celebrating. But life is also filled with smaller achievements that carry great personal significance. Here are some examples:
Health & Fitness
- Making your bed each morning to start the day with order and intentionality
- Preparing healthy meals and becoming more mindful about nutrition
- Walking 10,000 steps per day for a month straight to increase mobility
- Waking up early to develop a new morning routine
- Sticking to a new workout regimen or fitness program for 2-3 months
- Completing a 30-day yoga or meditation challenge
Personal Growth
- Reading a personal development book that changes your mindset
- Having difficult but necessary conversations to address problems head-on
- Establishing boundaries around your time and mental energy
- Practicing greater patience, empathy and compassion in your relationships
- Journaling regularly to boost self-reflection and emotional intelligence
- Making your needs a priority instead of always putting others first
Home & Finance
- Thoroughly cleaning and organizing an overwhelming space
- Paying off one credit card or loan to reduce overall debt
- Building a minimalist capsule wardrobe to reduce clutter
- Creating a monthly budget and sticking to it
- Automating savings through apps like Digit or Acorns
- Meal prepping to reduce food waste and eat healthier
Creativity & Learning
- Completing a paintings, pottery project, or other artistic piece
- Learning basics of a foreign language using Duolingo
- Writing a short story, poem, or blog post for fun
- Trying a new recipe that turns out better than expected
- Teaching yourself to play an instrument like ukulele from YouTube videos
- Starting a DIY project like refinishing old furniture
Career & Education
- Revising your resume and LinkedIn profile
- Reaching out to networking contacts in your industry
- Taking a LinkedIn course to gain hard skills
- Asking for feedback and implementing it at work
- Applying to jobs more aligned with your interests and strengths
- Receiving positive feedback or praise from your manager
Small accomplishments matter because they build confidence, reinforcement positive habits, and fuel motivation through progress and consistency. Over time, small wins compound to drive remarkable transformation. Each goal achieved brings you one step closer to your highest potential.
Examples of Major Achievements to Strive Toward
While appreciating small acts of progress, it’s also helpful to have bigger goals to stretch yourself. Major achievements usually require extensive planning, commitment and perseverance over months or years. They also provide incredible learning opportunities when you inevitably face obstacles and failures along the way.
Here are some examples of significant achievements you can strive toward in different facets of life:
Career & Business
- Climbing to an executive leadership role at a prestigious company
- Founding a profitable, high-growth startup or small business
- Publishing an influential book, article, or piece of thought leadership
- Winning a coveted industry award or recognition
- Spearheading a project or initiative with substantial impact
- Pioneering an innovative product, service, or business model
Creative & Athletic
- Producing a documentary film or photo series exhibited in galleries
- Starring as the lead role in a theater production or play
- Landing a record deal or releasing a successful music album
- Publishing a bestselling fiction or nonfiction book
- Qualifying for the Olympics after years of intense training
- Winning first place in a bodybuilding, CrossFit, or powerlif
Being able to pursue interesting, high-quality work that has a positive impact
The vast majority of participants wrote about the importance of having interesting, stimulating work that gave them a sense of pleasure, pride and even joy. Constructing careers in which it was possible to have the freedom and autonomy to pursue work that mattered was an achievement in itself.
“There is nothing more exhilarating than to find out something for the first time – something that may have existed for over a billion years, but was never known before.”
Margaret Robinson
The women we spoke to took great pleasure in the quality of their work, whether that meant pride in the elegance and clarity of a piece of research or reorganising an administrative system in a way that actively contributed to the effectiveness of a department. Work was particularly prized if it demonstrated a creativity that took people or ideas to the next level and raised the standard of what was possible. Many participants still seemed to retain a sense of ‘wide-eyed wonder’ in relation to their work, and talked about the enduring memories of early breakthroughs. If they got external recognition, these achievements became even more tangible and helped to build self-confidence.
There was an awareness of the world beyond Cambridge, and many people talked about wanting to connect, using everything from blogging, lecturing and conferences, through to the more conventional route of publication. Participants talked about becoming part of a wider intellectual or professional community, which then became a source of support, acknowledgement and stimulation. It was clear that they had an appetite to keep learning and developing throughout their careers.
“My previous jobs had always been ‘just a job’, but I feel that the role I hold now is more important than that; it has purpose and gives me a lot of satisfaction.”
Helen Marshall
Work was almost always seen as a core part of the participants’ lives. Many of them found that it gave them a clear sense of purpose and was fundamental to their sense of who they were. Whilst work was rarely pursued to the exclusion of all else, it was nonetheless a central part of their existence. Some people talked about putting their heart and soul into their work, and also described the often gruelling journey they had undertaken to achieve a particular outcome.
The appetite to make a tangible impact through their work was clearly discernible. Inevitably, the type of impact participants were able to achieve varied considerably, depending on their specific areas of expertise, their seniority and the scope of their role. Although the nature and scale of the impact varied, the need to have an impact didn’t. Some participants took simple pleasure in the incremental improvements that were the fabric of their daily work, or in the persistent effort necessary to land vital grants and donations. Others pointed to keynote moments such as coordinating the press conference for a Nobel Prize winner from the University, or securing a medical breakthrough that would help to address a life-threatening illness. Several participants talked about taking pride in having changed their field with a particular discovery, but they did so with no more or less pride than those in service or support roles who helped to create the conditions for such a breakthrough, for example by ensuring a lab was safe and fully resourced.
Handling challenge, complexity and change
Achievement is not just about the happy, shiny things – it is also about withstanding tough times and challenging situations. Resilience demonstrated under pressure is perhaps the darker side of achievement, but is in many ways just as important as the more obvious markers of success.
“I am very proud of the fact that I have been able to pick myself up when things have gone wrong – as they have, not infrequently.”
Athene Donald
No career is a seamless progression upwards, and many of the participants were able to process the inevitable bumps in the road in a positive way. There was pride in having withstood a range of setbacks, from failing to secure a particular promotion or having a grant application turned down through to conquering debilitating performance anxiety as a musician. The capacity to pick oneself up, bounce back and carry on regardless was something that participants clearly valued in themselves and others. This was also evident amongst those who talked about forging a career whilst having a chronic illness or depression, or providing support to a family member who was experiencing difficulties. Navigating adversity seems to have had the effect of sweetening subsequent achievements.
“My greatest achievements are often directly related to my greatest challenges.”
Kirsty Allen
There was also a link with boldness and risk-taking that suggested many people weren’t just coping with challenge but were being actively stimulated by it. There were individuals who seemed to thrive under arduous field conditions without running water or electricity, whilst others jumped into the unknown by taking a job in a different discipline or on a different continent. There was an appetite to seek out situations that were scary because they offered the promise of new learning opportunities and excitement.
“I think one reinvents oneself each time one makes a serious move; it is very rewarding to be able to make major changes, stand back from the process and reassess.”
Wendy Pullan
How to Answer “What Is Your Greatest Achievement?” Interview Question!
FAQ
What are some examples of accomplishments?
What is your achievement in life?
What is an example of a personal achievement?
For example, a strong professional achievement could involve writing a new sales pitch at work that lead to a 50% increase in deals over your first year. Personal achievements are, as the name suggests, successes in your personal life. These can include anything from building a house to running the Boston Marathon.
What are some examples of life accomplishments?
For example, graduations, weddings, career promotions, homeownership, etc. are all monumental moments and major achievements in life. There are tonsof other examples of life accomplishments to be proud of. We are going to explore 100 different life accomplishment examples in this post.
What are life achievements?
These life achievements are often those milestone momentsthat we commit to memory and can look back on with pride and a sense of accomplishment. For example, graduations, weddings, career promotions, homeownership, etc. are all monumental moments and major achievements in life. There are tonsof other examples of life accomplishments to be proud of.
What are examples of personal accomplishments?
Personal accomplishments are things that a person has done that are meaningful to them. These can include overcoming a problem, taking a risk, working towards a goal, epic experiences, competitive wins, taking on responsibility, helping others and gaining recognition. The following are further examples of personal accomplishments.
