Goal setting is like game setting. You start at level 1 and graduate into unforeseen directions.
If you’re lucky, you’ll ping-pong forward, making leaps and bounds.
But more often than not, declaring your ambitions acts as a compass, guiding you with mere suggestions on how to proceed.
Like a magnet, the lighthouse tugs you into its sphere of safety. It confronts the fog with luminosity and compels one, at least temporarily, to play it safe. Resistance celebrates your inaction.
Stubborn, you move on to ride the waves of uncertainty.
Fear is good quality control. And experience puts bones in the goose.
The same way an athlete strengthens their body through bicep curls or a monk jogs the brain through meditation, one can practice grit.
The intelligent machine evolves to beat a chess master after learning from its own failed iterations. Wrongs accumulate until they drive the resilient foot-dragging laggard into right.
Anticipation, fear of the future — what turns the foot-dragging laggard into a resilient hammer is the extra push. And then move into the direction that feels right.
Effort investigates the self and paves the road of life with a bunch of guesses. Fortunately, those assumptions appear to get more accurate with time.
3, 2, 1. Action!