Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Life Is Not An Ever Rising Trajectory

Goals, we should all have them, and the bolder the better. Mostly, I think that if your goals are well formulated, you have a solid plan which involves habit change, and you work consistently and steadily, you will be successful. But that does not mean that each individual day or session brings success. Goal attainment, as anyone who has worked at a long term goal can tell you, is a step wise process of lurching ahead, falling back a little, then gaining ground. Although humans like to see life as a linear ever rising trajectory, little, if anything in life actually falls out this way.

I have come to view goals as a process oriented activity. Choose the goal, make the plan, follow the plan, adapt and change the plan as new information comes along, in an iterative cycle. Success is judged not by whether or not you met the goal on any given day - although that is ultimately the target - but by how well you followed the plan. A process oriented mind set enables you to keep steadily working away, success feeding success, even if the end point is still many months or years away.

In a world of instant gratification and fake social media, the truth of meeting goals - consistency, habit change and iterative plan making - has been lost amid staged photo-shoots and general fakery. Having a process oriented approach means every session is a win and you won't have to resort to the dreadful revisionist history where you pretend you did not want that goal anyway.

The picture below is sunrise from my home bay this morning.  Worth getting up for. 




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