Here’s how I was going wrong.
Let’s say I had a goal to own and drive a Mercedes SLC, but ideally, I'm wishing for a Lamborghini Aventador. I work hard and I achieve the Mercedes but I still have this pervasive fantasy of the Lamborghini. I will not be happy, and that satisfaction I seek will elude me because my ideal wasn’t met. This is a recipe for misery.
If you’re growing but constantly measuring where you are against your ideal, you’ll never get there. Your ideal is a mental construct like a horizon. You can never walk to a point called a horizon. It is an idea that helps you understand that we live on a spherical planet that turns on its axis. It’s useful but not real. The ideal was just a fanciful thought, while progress to the Mercedes was real. Real because I had empirical evidence that I was moving towards
it. You’re in The Gap when you are judging your results based on an ideal you’ll never get to. This will lead you to always feel dissatisfied with yourself.
What I should have been doing is making measurable steps to my goal and looking back at my progress. This is what is called The Gain and leads to happiness. While The Gap leads you to misery.
Now I’m not saying in this example I will never own a Lamborghini Aventador. What I’m saying is you have to make it a solid goal and not wish fulfilment that an ideal provides. Your steps must give you an actual indication of how far or how close you are to your goal. Measurable is the keyword.
It’s not about hitting your goals every time, it’s about knowing you’re making headway towards them because you are measuring your progress - knowing where you started from and knowing where you are now. With that information at hand, you can make informed decisions on how you proceed.
Your ideal shouldn’t be your goal. Your ideal should be the motivation you use to attain your goal.
When you rob yourself of the joy of measuring how far you’ve come, you don’t experience happiness, gratitude, or confidence. And when you don’t experience these, you actually set lower and less clear goals. Put simply, when you take the time to reflect and measure how far you’ve come, you’ll set more precise and more powerful goals, because those goals will be set from a place of confidence, happiness, and gratitude. They’ll also be set from a place of tangible
measurement, not abstract idealization.
Its never too late to up your your goal-setting game and I have a feeling this is going to make me 10X more effective.
