It started with TikTok. Not the way I usually begin a blog post, I know.
My 22 year old son was sharing something he had come across online about the EGOT. If you are like me and this was a new term, EGOT stands for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony, the four major awards in American entertainment. Winning all four is considered one of the rarest achievements in the performing arts. Only about two dozen people in history have done it. Audrey Hepburn. Whoopi Goldberg. Mel Brooks. John Legend. And just recently, Steven Spielberg completed his EGOT with his first Grammy win.
What makes the EGOT so compelling is not that someone won four awards. It is that each award represents mastery in a completely different domain. Television. Music. Film. Theatre. You cannot achieve it by going deeper in one area. You have to go wider. You have to be excellent across distinct worlds, not just within one. My son explained all of this, and we talked about some of the winners and how long it took them. Some achieved it in just a few years. Others took decades.
Then the conversation shifted in a way I did not expect. He asked me: What would be your personal EGOT? Not the entertainment version. A life version. Four monumental accomplishments, across different dimensions of who you are, that together would represent a kind of complete, well-lived success. Not one single promotion. Not a big moment. But four achievements, spanning different parts of your life, that when taken together would signal something rare and meaningful. I have been thinking about it ever since.
Why It Is Harder Than It Sounds
The instinct is to start listing accomplishments, but that misses the point entirely. If all four of your categories live inside your job title, you have not built an EGOT. You have built a performance review. A personal EGOT has to work the way the real one does. The four categories need to be distinct. They should span different dimensions of a life: your professional impact, your relationships, your personal growth, your creative or intellectual contribution. And at least one of them should sit in a space where no one is watching, where there is no audience and no award, where the only person who knows whether you showed up is you.
What Could Go Into a Personal EGOT?
This is where it gets interesting, because the categories will look completely different depending on who you are and what you value. That is the whole point. For a classroom teacher, maybe it is the lesson that changed a student’s trajectory, the relationship with a colleague that made both of you better, the years of quiet professional learning that no one saw, and the moment you realized your classroom had become a place where every kid felt they belonged. For a principal, maybe it is the culture you built in a school, the leaders you developed who went on to lead their own schools, the trust you earned from a community during a difficult time, and the personal discipline that kept you grounded through all of it.
For a parent, maybe it is the career you built, the marriage you sustained, the children you raised into independent people, and the personal passion you refused to let go of even when life got busy. For a coach, maybe it is the championships and the losing seasons that taught you more, the former players who still call you, the way you showed up for practice on the days nobody was watching, and the moment you realized coaching was never really about the sport. The categories are yours to define. But they have to stretch you. They have to cross boundaries. And at least one of them should make you a little uncomfortable, because it represents a dimension of your life where you have not yet done enough.
The Quiet Part
Here is what I think makes this exercise so valuable, and why it has stayed with me since that conversation with my son. Most of us, if we are honest, are chasing one or two of our four. We pour ourselves into our careers. Or into our families. Or into our health. And the other categories quietly fade. We tell ourselves we will get to them later. But later has a way of becoming never.
The EGOT forces a question that is easy to avoid: Am I paying attention to all four? Or have I let something important go silent while the other parts of my life got louder? I went through my own version of this exercise. I will not share all four here, but I will say this: one of mine has nothing to do with education. It lives completely outside my professional life, and it is the one I have been most tempted to neglect over the years. Naming it out loud, even just to myself, changed how I thought about the rest.
Your Turn
So here is the invitation. Think about your personal EGOT. Not four things you have already done, though some of them might be underway. Think about four categories of excellence that, if you could achieve all of them across the arc of your life, would represent the fullest, most complete version of who you want to be. Make sure they are distinct. Make sure they stretch across different dimensions. Make sure at least one of them scares you a little. And then ask yourself the honest question: if someone who loves you defined your four, would they match yours? It is a conversation worth having.
I am glad my son started it, even if it came from TikTok.
The image at the top of this post was generated through AI. Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers (for our students this post would be a Yellow assignment – see link to explanation chart) as I edited and refined my thinking.