My Goal for 2018 is Application
Goals are tough. No, no, not because there’s effort involved — that’s part of it — but because they’re difficult to determine. Why are you actually setting the goal? What do you want to accomplish? To what end are you aiming? Are you setting a goal out of obligation or a need to impress other people?
Humans are motivated by similar needs. We’ve learned this. We’ve seen this through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We’re all setting out to accomplish the same or similar broad missions. They’re just customized to meet our personal context, individual value systems, and skill-sets.
Our larger goals are configured on a macro level, but the micro is where we accomplish them. An overarching category might be physical health — the macro — so we aim to cook healthy meals as individual events — the micro.
But success in the micro isn’t necessarily difficult to account for. What happens in the micro isn’t just about creating lists or deciding on targets to aim at, what happens in the micro you already know how to do, it’s choosing to do.
We all have goals. We all have an ideal in our minds that we fixate toward when we imagined the future we want for ourselves. We don’t need a New Year to remind us that we want healthy relationships, a satisfying career, and that we want to accomplish various milestones that could range from running a marathon to writing a book.
The New Year doesn’t change what we want in the macro, it just makes us think about how we’re performing the micro.
And it’s pretty easy, it’s all about application.
Just Do What You Should Be Doing
It happens to all of us. We wonder why there isn’t progress in an area and why we haven’t improved. Usually we just play dumb. We like to imagine that with enough reflection and fuzzy feelings things will turn out the way we want them to. It’s an interesting strategy, because we all know deep down that it doesn’t actually work.
We’re smart. We know how life works. It’s as simple as input equalling output. But for some reason we forget this.
We forget that we already know that being healthy requires a disciplined diet. We forget that we already know that running a marathon requires a training regimen. And we forget that good relationships require good communication and effort. None of this is new.
We don’t fail in the macro, just the micro.
Instead of determining a list of what needs to be done in 2018 — I already know because it’s been cataloged in my head for quite some time and it drives who I am — I am deciding on the goal of application. My goal is simply to apply what I know, and to apply it in the micro of my life.
I know the fundamentals. Instead of letting them rest idle in the recesses of my mind, I’ll put them to work.
I know that I spend too much time on social media, so I’ll shut the apps down and stop looking. I know that I want to be productive and keep learning, so I’ll shut off YouTube and read a book.
Don’t get me wrong, these minor adjustments and applications won’t meet any specific goal if I’m not working toward it directly — reading a book won’t make me better in the communications field unless I target that area and with definable metrics — but these adjustments are the point. They’re obvious.
We all know what we should be doing and we all know where we waste time or fail at our own aims, so, let’s just apply that knowledge.
No self-help seminar or business book or philosophy will ever create external results unless we get comfortable with the actual hard part.
Thinking isn’t hard. Fantasizing isn’t hard. Creating a to-do-list is never hard. Making up goals for the sake of having a warm and fuzzy feeling about what could be isn’t hard.
Doing is hard.
Application is hard.
Not wasting time when you know you are wasting time is hard.
You know this. I know this. We all know this.
So instead of setting out a game-plan of nine goals you decided on a whim a few days leading up to 2018, set out to capitalize on the moments and time that you know you are already wasting. Because that’s where goals are accomplished, through the drudges of the doing and not the planning.
