You might think that writing down your goals is enough. It isn’t. It’s an essential step, but don’t think that the mere existence of what you are supposed to do on paper is the only thing you need to do, and then the rest would take care of itself, like it’s gonna be just a matter of time until you reach those intended outcomes. It doesn’t work this way. Nevertheless, you still need to write everything down, even if you would never forget them if you didn’t.
One of the things that might stand in your way to accomplishing what you already decided to firmly would be your habits for example.
You seem to plan your life as if you exist in a world full of commitments only, devoid of any habit whatsoever.
Like I understand that I should do this and that, so let’s just schedule them and call it a day.
No. None of that would be finished even if you wanted to, and even if you pushed yourself as much as you could. Doing stuff whether you feel like it or not does not work long term, and is a recipe for burnout, not from the action taken itself, not from the work involved, but ironically enough, from decision fatigue. Let that sink in.
In order to accept doing something, you have to be able to imagine it, and not from scratch, but from memory. This is different from just recalling it, because remembering stuff might not necessarily involve any kind of imagination or visualization. If you cannot picture yourself doing something in your mind before doing it in the real world, you won’t do it. Like no. Don’t even try. It’s ball and chains. Moreover, if you cannot form that picture based upon your past experiences, and withdraw suggestions and confirmations to that picture from your memory, you won’t move. In simple terms, if you cannot imagine yourself doing it because you have done it before, you will not be able to move, or take action or the first step, and you will end up crying for the help of your fluid intelligence like there’s no tomorrow. Notice that I said cannot imagine, not do not imagine. Yes, you can still do stuff without imagining it prior to or before doing it. But this doesn’t mean that you cannot imagine it if you tried to just for fun or for the love of it. And that imagination has to be from or based upon past experiences or previous knowledge that came from real world practice, not from speculation or the kind of imagination that falls in the realm of what would planets in different galaxies look like, let’s figure that out by exercising our imagination a little bit.
That is not the end of the story. You will be pulled toward your habits, regardless of what they are, and whether or not they’re good or bad, just because you have done them in the past over and over again. You don’t follow your habits for the purpose of automation or simplicity, but only because this is the way that the thing has been done before, that is, only because this thing has become a habit or integrated into your nervous system as the way to go. Even if you present it with a different solution that you know is infinitely better by every atom in your body, you would still infinitely resist implementing that solution, and call yourself an idiot because of that, just because the habit overrides any better suggestion as to how to proceed through your day or how to handle or do anything there is. This is not the power of habit, but the weakness of habit. We are weakened because we can have and will definitely have habits, and this significantly contributes to our suffering and misery as a living species.
Still we have to work with the problem, or despite the existence of the problem, and play along, as opposed to declare war upon it, and refuse to move forward.
If you find yourself enthusiastic about a bunch of new activities that presumably are going to turn your life around, before writing them down as goals, that are going to drag you down because they will be placeholders, suggestions, and ideas that you cannot do, and so will be overloaded because of them without being able to get them over with ever, integrate them into your system as habits first, by introducing yourself to doing them long enough or for quite some time, until they become habits and become recognized by your body as acceptable behavior and stuff that would be taken seriously if written down as goals, because now you can imagine yourself doing them from memory or past experience.
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