This week has been marked by decade in review posts and tweetstorms. This from Ian Bogost on Twitter this morning:

I am not sure these ‘decade-in-review’ tweetstorm summaries work once you’re not in your 20’s/30’s. Eventually you’re just … living your life. It’s not bad, exactly, it’s just that the momentous stuff is somewhat front-loaded.

There’s the implicit assumption of movement for all of us. Everyone’s always on to the next thing. It seems we’re never quite satisfied with the thing we’ve got. The nice part about moving beyond Bogost’s front-loaded era is that you find out that you can be happy with who you are at the moment or the decade.

It’s interesting that I have yet to see a physician tweet that for a decade she was there for tens of thousands of patients. Somehow it just doesn’t pack the same punch as the tales of exponential success so casually delivered over the past week. But that’s what many of us do. I consider it a privilege to have been trusted by those thousands of parents. Talk about a personal accomplishment. And built in to my work and my decade are thousands of moments that you would never believe.

Part of my decade was spent bringing two children out of their pre-school and school-age years and in to the stages of young adulthood. My wish for them is that they can achieve the same level of equanimity that I think I’ve achieved. Hopefully they hit a point where they are happy with what they do when they get up in the morning. It doesn’t mean that they don’t continue to grow, evolve, or create. Quite the contrary.

Driven more by an internal compass, at some point you stop looking to build a story for the outside world or the Twitterverse.

That’s how we might measure a successful decade, I believe.