"The Joy of Accomplishment"

"The joy of achievement has no gender. 

It doesn't not mean beating anyone at anyone else's game. 

It simply means doing the best you can with what you have, whoever you are;

it's being true to oneself."

Amelia Earhart

Ruth Law getting some well deserved
recognition after her record breaking flight. 

When Earhart made these remarks perhaps she was thinking of Ruth Law, whose non-stop Chicago to New York flight in 1915 made her the first woman to fly at night. Numbed by freezing temperatures, piloting a rickety 100-horsepower Curtiss Pusher biplane perched on something resembling a lawn chair fastened to the root of the wing, she also broke two other records that day - American non-stop cross-country flight for men and for women and longest non-stop cross-country flight for women anywhere in the world. 

At a prestigious Hotel Astor dinner in her honor, attended by President Wilson and the 
First Lady, one speaker noted that a man could merit a dinner easily enough as a "Mason or a naughty Elk", but "for a woman to sit in glory at the Hotel Astor she must do something superhuman."

Superhuman indeed.

She dared to fly faster and higher than anyone before her, in dark, cold and nasty skies. Not only that, she pioneered in an era unaccustomed to women voting much less flaunting bold loops and spectacular stunts in the middle of the night - did I mention Law was an aerobatic pilot as well!
Doing all this made Ruth Law an instant celebrity but by her own account she did not do it for the fame or the fortune and with "no expectations of rewards", but for "the pure joy of accomplishment" 

In 1935 aviator Jean Batten, a New Zealand stunner said it so well after her flight in a closed-cockpit Percival Gull monoplane on a non-stop flight across the dark stretches of the Atlantic from Africa to South America - "I experienced once again the greatest and most lasting of joys: the joy of achievement."

Jean Batten -Always the lady!
Even while working on an airplane engine

Fame and fortune can be short lived but the feeling of having done something meaningful is everlasting. Accomplishments, no matter how big or small, count for something wonderful. 

Perhaps that's what motivates all of us.