On maximizing your effectiveness; A healthy dose of reality: Who are you? Where are you?
When travelling to a destination, we must begin where we are. It is so very fundamental and logical that when travelling from point A to point B that we are starting from point A that we take this fact for granted. When we are attempting to do this in a more abstract way, such as a journey of self-improvement, taking this for granted is a big and easy way of setting ourselves up for failure and not ever reaching point B.
My friend and I who are pursuing this goal of self-improvement and living life consciously and having a life's purpose that we are attempting to reach are two different people attempting to achieve somewhat similar things. Our approaches are going to have to differ if we are both to achieve our maximum potential. For example, she has a very detailed spreadsheet outlining her larger life-purposes which she further breaks down into sub-goals and so on into much finer grained short-term goals. This allows her to track her progress and ensure that she is on-track in her pursuit. I on the other hand tend to take a more seat-of-the-pants, shoot-from-the-hip approach. Her method is good and I recognize the benefit in doing it so I am doing something similar, but my strengths don't suit my using the exact same method as hers. Were I to do it her way, I would be spending most of my time trying to build this outline and keep it updated, and not a whole lot of my effort would be spent in actually achieving my goals.
This is but one example of the importance of knowing where point A is before embarking on a mission of reaching point B.
THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING YOURSELF
If you have ever set yourself a goal and had a difficult time reaching it, perhaps it is because you have not properly defined that goal, or have not properly recognized your starting point. Setting yourself a goal, especially a long-term goal where you cannot achieve it in a short enough time span to recognize that you are actually achieving it, may require identifying milestones along the way so that you can track your progress.
For example, if you are dieting and your goal is to reach 150 lbs. and you currently weigh 153 lbs., that's fairly easy to track and recognize that you're on track because it's such a short distance to go. Now imagine that you want to reach that same 150 lbs. but you currently weigh 180 lbs. This is a longer term goal, so you set yourself shorter term milestones to track your progress such as losing 1 lb. every 2 days.
This way you can see that you are actually reaching that goal rather than going about whatever plan you had to reach your goal weight and not using a scale for 2 months and then suddenly finding that after the last 60 days you have lost a whopping 3 lbs. What a surprise that would be, right? Obviously that wouldn't be an effective way of pursuing your goal, so you would weigh yourself every day and note whether you'd lost your pound every other day or not, to see whether you are on track.
But what if instead you wanted to reach your target weight by a particular date? You could still set yourself the smaller goal of losing a pound every other day; and while this makes it easier to tell that you are making progress, it doesn't really tell you whether you are actually on-track to reach your goal. This is an example of where identifying point A is important in getting from point A to point B. You have a specific goal and a specific timeline for reaching that goal, and tracking whether you have lost a pound every other day is likely not to keep you on track for reaching your goal within your desired timeline.
What you would do in this case is weigh yourself at the outset so you know where you are starting from. With this, it's easy to see whether your goal involves losing a pound every other day or 10 lbs. per day which tells you whether your goal and your timeline are realistic or not, and allows you to define concrete milestones along the way to tell not only whether you have lost a pound in the past 2 days or not, but whether you are still on-track to reach your desired weight by the desired date or not.
This gives you another tool to use to make adjustments in your day-to-day pursuit of your goal. This not only gives you the ability to see whether a time-critical goal is on track, but it also allows you to evaluate your effectiveness in pursuing your goal, and gives you a tool to analyze on-the-fly whether your goal has been realistic and gives you the opportunity to make adjustments along the way not only in your pursuit, but in your plan of pursuit and even the goal itself, which can make it more likely that you will actually achieve your goal.
Here's an extreme example in order to better illustrate my point. Let's say you weigh 180 lbs. and you want to reach 150 lbs., and let's say it's June 1st and you want to reach your target weight by June 8th. Now anyone who's ever dieted knows that you can't do that, short of having liposuction or being involved in a tragic accident and having to have a leg amputated right? But what if you've never dieted before, nor known anyone who has, nor do you know anything about dieting, let's just assume for a moment that you have no awareness that it's not possible to lose 30 lbs. in anywhere near a week. In that case, you'd be setting yourself up for failure.
You fail in reaching your goal once, well ok, sometimes people fail. So you try again, this time weighing 176 lbs. and wanting to reach 150 lbs. by June 15th. Again, not a realistic goal as anyone who's ever dieted can tell you. But our hypothetical dieter doesn't know that, they only know that they failed to reach their goal last time, but this time they're really determined! A week goes by and they fail again. Let's say this time the failure is really disappointing because they tried so much harder this time, they were really committed to reaching their goal this time. Now they're depressed and they binge like never before and gain back all the weight they'd lost and then some.
Now not only did they fail, but they have further to go to reach their goal for next time! That is, if there IS a next time. Anyone who has set goals for themselves and repeatedly not reached their goals knows that with each failure it becomes more difficult to see the value in setting a goal for themselves and to actually set a goal the next time because there becomes an assumption of failure. Failure tends to cause one to lose sight of the possibility of success and makes them less likely to pursue bigger and bigger goals and want to improve over where they are today.
It almost goes without saying in a way, successful people tend to be successful, and people who are unsuccessful tend to be unsuccessful. The thing is, in most cases there is no invisible barrier keeping unsuccessful people from being successful. Much as they would like to believe, there is not some big conspiracy out there to keep them from becoming our Mr. Successful. More likely, it is his own failures which are blocking him from trying to become a success. After all, he has failed at the last 20 things he has tried, why would this time be any different?
This is why I believe that it is paramount to properly and accurately identify point A before you try to get from point A to point B. It is especially important to do this with a more abstract goal where point A and point B aren't physical places that you can just open your eyes and see. And more important still if point B is something you haven't seen before and haven't achieved before, such that it really is a foreign thing to you.
In the case of self-improvement, or pursuing a lofty and far-reaching life's purpose where failure would become ultimate because any true measurement would only occur at the end of one's life, it really is important in the pursuit of this goal not to fail. In this case, identifying point A actually means removing one's rose-tinted glasses and taking a solid, no-holds-barred, honest and realistic look into one's deepest, darkest, most-hidden places and identifying the real you; the good, the bad, and the ugly all together.
An example that I gave to my friend recently was where she told me that it would be best, in living life consciously and pursuing my life's goal, to wake up early and spend some time each morning as a part of my daily routine thinking about what my overall goal is and thinking about the smaller, short-term goals involved so that I can spend my day more effectively pursuing those goals consciously. I agreed that this would be the most effective way to approach each day and that this is a great idea. I also pointed out that because I know myself quite well by now, that I also knew I have a high likelihood of over-sleeping and not waking up with enough time to actually do this. That doesn't mean that I should throw the idea out and resign myself to failure in waking up to live life consciously, but it also means not to fail at the larger goal just for the sake of perfecting its pursuit and ultimately failing at that early stage.
So my suggestion back to my friend was, knowing my likelihood of failure and what that point of failure would be, to find a workaround while trying to address the roadblock which would most likely keep me from being successful in that smaller goal. The workaround in this case would be, rather than spending 30 minutes in the morning before I go on with my day thinking about my overall goal and mission and the smaller steps that need to be made in their pursuit, start out by spending 30 minutes per day before going to sleep doing the same thing. Except since it's at the end of the day rather than the beginning and not being able to use it to plan my day, instead using it as a time of reflection, a time to look back over the day and determine what my effectiveness was and where I could've been better. Then to set the goal of waking up 5 minutes early the following day to attempt to plan in advance for the day to maximize my effectiveness and gradually work that 5 minutes up to the ultimate goal of waking up early enough to think about my life-goal and live my day consciously, making the most effective use possible of my time.
This way, if I fail to wake up early the next day, I have at least accomplished something by the end of the day. It's a partial accomplishment at best, but a partial accomplishment is better than none. And it's not the end goal anyway, it's just the best step I can make towards the goal of waking up early and living my day consciously with maximum effectiveness for today given my starting point, my point A. This sets me up not for failure at reaching a goal I'm likely not to reach, but for success in setting a realistic course toward reaching that goal. Over time, I can learn to wake up early and to make living my day consciously a part of my morning routine, such that oversleeping will be the exception rather than the rule.
Hopefully this example illustrates my thesis point of identifying point A before embarking on a journey to point B. In the case of my pursuing my life-mission, my larger goal of changing the world and improving myself, point A translates into who I am. And who I am is more than where I happen to be standing or sitting at the time, or what my name is, or who my parents are. Who I am is those things in addition to my mindset, my heart, my soul, my mood, my time and place in the world, my time and place in my life, my desires, my motivations, my strengths, my weaknesses, my successes and failures, my experiences, my past and my present, and even my future. All of these things play a role in how I will react to different events and different settings, and in whether I will be successful with a given pursuit or not, because all of these things affect whether or not a particular course of action will actually be effective FOR ME.
My friend and I who are pursuing this goal of self-improvement and living life consciously and having a life's purpose that we are attempting to reach are two different people attempting to achieve somewhat similar things. Our approaches are going to have to differ if we are both to achieve our maximum potential. For example, she has a very detailed spreadsheet outlining her larger life-purposes which she further breaks down into sub-goals and so on into much finer grained short-term goals. This allows her to track her progress and ensure that she is on-track in her pursuit. I on the other hand tend to take a more seat-of-the-pants, shoot-from-the-hip approach. Her method is good and I recognize the benefit in doing it so I am doing something similar, but my strengths don't suit my using the exact same method as hers. Were I to do it her way, I would be spending most of my time trying to build this outline and keep it updated, and not a whole lot of my effort would be spent in actually achieving my goals.
This is but one example of the importance of knowing where point A is before embarking on a mission of reaching point B.
THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING YOURSELF
If you have ever set yourself a goal and had a difficult time reaching it, perhaps it is because you have not properly defined that goal, or have not properly recognized your starting point. Setting yourself a goal, especially a long-term goal where you cannot achieve it in a short enough time span to recognize that you are actually achieving it, may require identifying milestones along the way so that you can track your progress.
For example, if you are dieting and your goal is to reach 150 lbs. and you currently weigh 153 lbs., that's fairly easy to track and recognize that you're on track because it's such a short distance to go. Now imagine that you want to reach that same 150 lbs. but you currently weigh 180 lbs. This is a longer term goal, so you set yourself shorter term milestones to track your progress such as losing 1 lb. every 2 days.
This way you can see that you are actually reaching that goal rather than going about whatever plan you had to reach your goal weight and not using a scale for 2 months and then suddenly finding that after the last 60 days you have lost a whopping 3 lbs. What a surprise that would be, right? Obviously that wouldn't be an effective way of pursuing your goal, so you would weigh yourself every day and note whether you'd lost your pound every other day or not, to see whether you are on track.
But what if instead you wanted to reach your target weight by a particular date? You could still set yourself the smaller goal of losing a pound every other day; and while this makes it easier to tell that you are making progress, it doesn't really tell you whether you are actually on-track to reach your goal. This is an example of where identifying point A is important in getting from point A to point B. You have a specific goal and a specific timeline for reaching that goal, and tracking whether you have lost a pound every other day is likely not to keep you on track for reaching your goal within your desired timeline.
What you would do in this case is weigh yourself at the outset so you know where you are starting from. With this, it's easy to see whether your goal involves losing a pound every other day or 10 lbs. per day which tells you whether your goal and your timeline are realistic or not, and allows you to define concrete milestones along the way to tell not only whether you have lost a pound in the past 2 days or not, but whether you are still on-track to reach your desired weight by the desired date or not.
This gives you another tool to use to make adjustments in your day-to-day pursuit of your goal. This not only gives you the ability to see whether a time-critical goal is on track, but it also allows you to evaluate your effectiveness in pursuing your goal, and gives you a tool to analyze on-the-fly whether your goal has been realistic and gives you the opportunity to make adjustments along the way not only in your pursuit, but in your plan of pursuit and even the goal itself, which can make it more likely that you will actually achieve your goal.
Here's an extreme example in order to better illustrate my point. Let's say you weigh 180 lbs. and you want to reach 150 lbs., and let's say it's June 1st and you want to reach your target weight by June 8th. Now anyone who's ever dieted knows that you can't do that, short of having liposuction or being involved in a tragic accident and having to have a leg amputated right? But what if you've never dieted before, nor known anyone who has, nor do you know anything about dieting, let's just assume for a moment that you have no awareness that it's not possible to lose 30 lbs. in anywhere near a week. In that case, you'd be setting yourself up for failure.
You fail in reaching your goal once, well ok, sometimes people fail. So you try again, this time weighing 176 lbs. and wanting to reach 150 lbs. by June 15th. Again, not a realistic goal as anyone who's ever dieted can tell you. But our hypothetical dieter doesn't know that, they only know that they failed to reach their goal last time, but this time they're really determined! A week goes by and they fail again. Let's say this time the failure is really disappointing because they tried so much harder this time, they were really committed to reaching their goal this time. Now they're depressed and they binge like never before and gain back all the weight they'd lost and then some.
Now not only did they fail, but they have further to go to reach their goal for next time! That is, if there IS a next time. Anyone who has set goals for themselves and repeatedly not reached their goals knows that with each failure it becomes more difficult to see the value in setting a goal for themselves and to actually set a goal the next time because there becomes an assumption of failure. Failure tends to cause one to lose sight of the possibility of success and makes them less likely to pursue bigger and bigger goals and want to improve over where they are today.
It almost goes without saying in a way, successful people tend to be successful, and people who are unsuccessful tend to be unsuccessful. The thing is, in most cases there is no invisible barrier keeping unsuccessful people from being successful. Much as they would like to believe, there is not some big conspiracy out there to keep them from becoming our Mr. Successful. More likely, it is his own failures which are blocking him from trying to become a success. After all, he has failed at the last 20 things he has tried, why would this time be any different?
This is why I believe that it is paramount to properly and accurately identify point A before you try to get from point A to point B. It is especially important to do this with a more abstract goal where point A and point B aren't physical places that you can just open your eyes and see. And more important still if point B is something you haven't seen before and haven't achieved before, such that it really is a foreign thing to you.
In the case of self-improvement, or pursuing a lofty and far-reaching life's purpose where failure would become ultimate because any true measurement would only occur at the end of one's life, it really is important in the pursuit of this goal not to fail. In this case, identifying point A actually means removing one's rose-tinted glasses and taking a solid, no-holds-barred, honest and realistic look into one's deepest, darkest, most-hidden places and identifying the real you; the good, the bad, and the ugly all together.
An example that I gave to my friend recently was where she told me that it would be best, in living life consciously and pursuing my life's goal, to wake up early and spend some time each morning as a part of my daily routine thinking about what my overall goal is and thinking about the smaller, short-term goals involved so that I can spend my day more effectively pursuing those goals consciously. I agreed that this would be the most effective way to approach each day and that this is a great idea. I also pointed out that because I know myself quite well by now, that I also knew I have a high likelihood of over-sleeping and not waking up with enough time to actually do this. That doesn't mean that I should throw the idea out and resign myself to failure in waking up to live life consciously, but it also means not to fail at the larger goal just for the sake of perfecting its pursuit and ultimately failing at that early stage.
So my suggestion back to my friend was, knowing my likelihood of failure and what that point of failure would be, to find a workaround while trying to address the roadblock which would most likely keep me from being successful in that smaller goal. The workaround in this case would be, rather than spending 30 minutes in the morning before I go on with my day thinking about my overall goal and mission and the smaller steps that need to be made in their pursuit, start out by spending 30 minutes per day before going to sleep doing the same thing. Except since it's at the end of the day rather than the beginning and not being able to use it to plan my day, instead using it as a time of reflection, a time to look back over the day and determine what my effectiveness was and where I could've been better. Then to set the goal of waking up 5 minutes early the following day to attempt to plan in advance for the day to maximize my effectiveness and gradually work that 5 minutes up to the ultimate goal of waking up early enough to think about my life-goal and live my day consciously, making the most effective use possible of my time.
This way, if I fail to wake up early the next day, I have at least accomplished something by the end of the day. It's a partial accomplishment at best, but a partial accomplishment is better than none. And it's not the end goal anyway, it's just the best step I can make towards the goal of waking up early and living my day consciously with maximum effectiveness for today given my starting point, my point A. This sets me up not for failure at reaching a goal I'm likely not to reach, but for success in setting a realistic course toward reaching that goal. Over time, I can learn to wake up early and to make living my day consciously a part of my morning routine, such that oversleeping will be the exception rather than the rule.
Hopefully this example illustrates my thesis point of identifying point A before embarking on a journey to point B. In the case of my pursuing my life-mission, my larger goal of changing the world and improving myself, point A translates into who I am. And who I am is more than where I happen to be standing or sitting at the time, or what my name is, or who my parents are. Who I am is those things in addition to my mindset, my heart, my soul, my mood, my time and place in the world, my time and place in my life, my desires, my motivations, my strengths, my weaknesses, my successes and failures, my experiences, my past and my present, and even my future. All of these things play a role in how I will react to different events and different settings, and in whether I will be successful with a given pursuit or not, because all of these things affect whether or not a particular course of action will actually be effective FOR ME.