If your small goals lead you on a path to your larger goals, great! Pac-man your way to success.
If you are more interested in points (completion over speedy achievement) your small goals are eating your larger goals.
Tag: gain-and-loss
- Theme: Growth
Conversational Cadence
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1–2 minutesThere is a cadence to conversation, but to learn the cadence doesn’t have to be equal and you don’t have to pepper people with interrogatory questions: you can speak less and let them reveal their nuanced depths.
- Theme: Growth
The long-awaited payoff
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1–2 minutesThere are days when your accumulated foibles, your crafted predilections, and adherence to productive systems syncs up into a harmonious payoff. There are days where any request made of you feels effortless as you respond easily, flowing through the day.
And you realize you are pretty damn good at this life thing. - Theme: Growth
Consequences of achievement
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1–2 minutesTo achieve we must be productive, garnering accolades which reaffirm your role and status within society. Achievement grants respect, and perhaps a kind of love.
The darker side is that the more you do the greater the odds of failure or attacking polarization, which can lead to a cycle of more achievement to stabilize and counteract your compromised role (respect).Unfortunately, doing “even more” also increases the odds of second order consequences and unintended harm. Yet, to refuse the challenging cycle of achievement (to do nothing) robs any potential for positive consequences.
- Theme: Growth
Failure is inevitable for growth
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1–2 minutesThe pain of failure is also a sign that you are on the right path, because at least you are challenging yourself rather than languishing in soft security.
From this perspective failure is never really failure, because it is merely the cost of taking a risk to grow. - Theme: Growth
No Virtue in Consistency
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1–2 minutesSelf Creation: the path of fixation leads to death, the path of fluidity leads to life.
There is no virtue in consistency if it prevents growth or change.
To prevent the death of "one’s self" is exactly what kills us: the inability to grow and transform.
- Theme: Growth
Living vs Achieving
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1–2 minutesThe paradox: we know that the "right thing to do" is to think long-term, which tends to be a costly upfront sacrifice, but it incurs the greater benefit (and less heartache and loss) in the future through less living now.
As a slave to the future we increasingly aggregate metrics on a weekly, daily, or hourly basis. Our new "living in the present" is the hyper-granular metrics of productive achievement for the future.And yes, getting 1% better daily, aggregating marginal gains, and system optimization can get you to your goal. But even if you have to schedule it in, put down your system and return to the land of the living at least once a day.
- Theme: Culture
The evolution of evolution
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1–2 minutesBefore the theory of evolution, everything must have been created whole. Now we believe it gradually changes and tests itself out over time.
Now we have memetic evolution: the spread and growth of ideas, testing themselves for supreme virulence and spread. Humans seem to be not only the creators, but the hosts and carriers for ideas.
There will be a next step.
- Theme: Self
Growth is Pain
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1–2 minutesTo want to grow is to embrace pain.
Growing requires stretching, breaking, and failing so that you become more. Growth can be forced upon you by external circumstances, which are never as kind as taking it upon yourself to start the journey.
A little pain for a little growth everyday seems like no pain, it can even feel like pleasure, while all the pain all at once can crush us.
- Theme: Growth
For Progress Revert
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1–2 minutesTo progress we can revert. This seems contradictory: to move into the future by embodying our past self rather than attempting to become something new.
Yet, often there is a conceit in novelty that side-tracks us for decades, while a reversion to core alignment is more beneficial than continual wandering.