3rd September 2026 – (Hong Kong) Ask any teacher in Hong Kong what they want for their students, and the word “achievement” will surface within seconds. Ask a confident professional at a networking event to describe themselves, and they will reach for the same word, usually attached to a list. Achievement has become the currency of self-worth in this city, traded openly and hoarded quietly. Yet for something we value so highly, we rarely pause to ask what it actually is, or whether it holds any value once the applause dies down.
Edward de Bono offered a useful complication to this question. He argued that achievement operates at two levels i.e. the outward, public kind that depends on the judgement of others, and the private kind that is a contract between a person and themselves. His example was pointed. A woodcarver who never shows his work, never sells it, and never seeks a review may still feel a genuine sense of achievement. However, de Bono also noticed the difficulty. Writing a book, he observed, offers a weaker sense of achievement than building a brick wall, because the wall simply stands where no wall stood before, while the book means little unless it is bought, read, and reviewed favourably. Achievement that depends on an audience, he concluded, is tantalising but elusive.
From the DSE examinations to the ranking of universities, from job titles to the size of an apartment, the city runs on external validation. Achievement here is rarely something you feel; it is something you can prove, present, and be measured against. The problem is that measurement requires a measurer, which means most of what we call achievement is not really ours. It belongs to whoever is keeping score.
Consider how the word is used with students. In theory, achievement means learning, growth, and the slow accumulation of understanding through effort and practice. In practice, it collapses into attainment – the grade, the score, the certificate. These are not the same thing. A student can attain an excellent result through memorisation or good fortune while learning very little, and another can achieve deep understanding while producing a mediocre transcript. The city, however, only has eyes for attainment, because attainment is legible to an audience. It fits neatly on a form. Learning, being invisible and internal, gets quietly discounted.
The consequences of this are not trivial. When achievement is defined entirely by external judgement, it becomes fragile. External praise fades. Awards gather dust. A promotion feels significant for a week, then becomes the new baseline against which the next disappointment is measured. This is the trap of the audience-dependent achievement: it never settles. There is always a higher rank, a better school, a bigger deal, and because the satisfaction came from the outside, it must constantly be renewed from the outside. It is worth asking whether a city that produces so many high performers also produces a proportionate amount of contentment, or whether the two have quietly parted ways.
There is also the question of what achievement does to us over time, and here the picture is genuinely double-sided. At its best, an achievement functions as evidence. It proves that planning and effort can produce results, it builds the confidence to attempt harder things, and it teaches transferable strategies. This is achievement as motivation, and it is real. But the same achievement can curdle into false hope. Past success tempts people into believing they no longer need to adapt or work hard, that a win in one arena guarantees a win in another. The rules of a new situation are rarely the rules of the old one. Worse, the memory of an old victory can push someone to chase goals that no longer reflect who they are, simply to recreate a feeling. Achievement, in other words, is not automatically good for you. It depends entirely on what you do with it.
So does having achievements matter? The honest answer is that it matters conditionally. Achievements matter when they bring personal satisfaction, when they mark genuine progress, or when they align with values a person actually holds. They matter far less when they exist only to be displayed. De Bono’s suggestion is quietly radical for a place like Hong Kong: the simpler and more personal your chosen sphere of achievement, the more likely you are to actually feel it. Growing tomatoes, finishing a project no one asked for, mastering something difficult in private, these are achievements that no audience can grant or take away.
The more useful habit is to separate what you have genuinely done from what has merely been recognised, and to notice that the two rarely match. A life spent accumulating achievements that require an audience is a life outsourced to the judgement of others. That is a poor bargain, however impressive the list looks on paper.
