Between aspiration and achievement there is only disappointment (for most people)
After you have set your targets and completed your project, what ever that is, and realised that you haven’t met some or all of your targets, all that’s left is a hole. It’s disappointment or a feeling of worthlessness because you didn’t make the achievements you promised yourself.
This is the problem with goal setting and target setting.
On the flipside, it focuses your mind, it gives you something to work to and stops you wasting time but on the other side it can be a negative thing in itself, leading to a constant feeling of being overwhelmed by what you’ve not achieved.
The clever people I have met, and the people I admire, don’t see it like this. The people I really admire in all walks of life see the gap as a place to learn and become motivated and never really seem to see achievement as the ultimate aim, for them it is all about travelling towards achievement.
Roddy Woomble (modern poet extraordinaire) wrote in his song – A New Day Has Begun – “abandon your ambitions – you’re overwhelmed by what you haven’t done”
One solution is to abandon your ambitions; the other is to embrace failure as a learning experience, as a motivation for going further in the future. At the moment I think I have still got enough energy to do the second.
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