What do you see every time that you open up Facebook, Twitter or Instagram? An old friend from high school just made a cobb salad, your coworker just ran 7.1 miles and took a sweaty selfie, the neighbor you never talk to just posted a picture of them picking up their daughter from school. You made a goal to lose fifteen pounds and you're proud of yourself for sticking to it. Of course, you can't forget to post a #transformationtuesday so all of your Facebook friends can be proud of you too. Social media is filled with parents bragging about the accomplishments of their children and people sharing pieces of their everyday lives in order to feel satisfaction from their "friends" that they might barely know.

Social media is an amazing device to stay in contact with family and friends throughout the globe, it's an innovative media outlet that delivers news to younger audiences. It's clearly made an impact on all generations, but especially Millennials since we grew up in a social media age where having a MySpace account was an essential part of our middle school years.

One of the biggest problems that social media presents is that it has taught us to share our daily goals, accomplishments and little steps along our lives to the world. We feel the need to share about our new haircut, or about a book we can't put down because we feel almost an obligation to report what happens in our daily lives to the world around us in order to get approval. By getting 233 likes on Instagram for a selfie, obviously I'm doing something right because people are liking how I look, so I'll keep posting selfies because I love the attention.

We rely on this approval from others in order to feel happy about our accomplishments and to feel good about ourselves. We post everything that we do in the light of social media for all people to see and leave nothing to the imagination. We as a generation, need to learn what it means to work hard in the dark.

Whether you're a student, an athlete, you're pursuing a promotion in your professional career or you're working hard to be a better parent to your children, each one of us has something that we're striving to be better at each day. We need to learn what it means, as a generation, to work hard in the dark when no one is watching, when there's no cameras, no status updates or tweets. We need to learn what it means to put down the phone when we've just lost five pounds, cut thirty seconds off of our mile time, when your daughter receives all A's on her first report card.

Because when we learn to hold back on sharing every little moment and accomplishment in our lives, we will learn what it means to be proud of ourselves without relying on how many likes we get on Facebook. All of the hard work that you've accomplished in the dark will show in the big moments and milestones. When you've made it through all the obstacles of a long-term relationship and you've become engaged to the love of your life, when you've gone through hell and back trying to prove your worth to your new boss and you get that promotion you've been eyeing for months, when you see your kid walk across that graduation stage knowing that they've battled many learning disabilities and have worked their ass off to get where they are now. Those are the moments that are worth sharing with the world, because you worked hard in the dark to get there.