Hey Friends,
We perceive things as being either good or bad depending on whether the specifics that are necessary for success have been defined and achieved.
I’ve noticed that people who measure their accomplish- ments in terms of specifics tend to be happier and a lot more energized than people who speak and think in gener- alities. Someone who responds to a question like, “How are things going?” with an answer like, “Things are pretty good” isn’t actually connecting with their real experience.
But if you think about specific facts when you assess your situation, this grounds your feeling in reality. For example, saying, “This recently completed project earned ten times as much money as it did last year” is very different from saying, “This project did pretty well.” If you work in the world of generalities, it’s easy to get confused about what’s really going on, and your sense of your achievements will be vague and unclear.
Ownership makes it better:
Your future growth depends on the degree to which you own how you use your brain for specific progress. Someone who uses their brain to measure using generalities will be lacking in clarity when it comes to both achievements and what their future holds.
But if you think in specifics when it comes to measuring your progress, you’ll have an accurate perspective about what you’ve done and where you are, and you’ll be in a better position to plan ahead to get bigger and better at what you do.
The only progress you can achieve is the progress you measure.
Vague and general goals like “success” or “wealth” or being more like someone you admire can’t lead you to the feeling of progress.
By__ Joe Sehrawat
Truly to get the feeling of progress, we need to base it on concrete facts. Vague and general goals like “success” or “wealth” or being more like someone you admire can’t lead you to the feeling of progress.
When we set goals, we must be specific so we know when they’re accomplished—usually, a number was reached or an event took place.
We’re time-compelled creatures:
We all have a sense of where we are in the flow of time, leading us to feel as though we’re either making progress and moving forward or falling back and getting left behind.
We can’t stop time to catch up to where we want to be. The only way to get ahead if you feel like you’re falling behind
is to make better use of your time. We have to set goals and measure progress in ways that will take us forward and improve our confidence and capabilities.
Experiencing time as a system of measurement keeps us sane. It makes our experience unique, and the more we use specific measurement to measure actual progress, where we can see we’ve clearly made improvements from where we were some time ago, the more positive we feel about what we’re doing.
From a material standpoint, life has vastly improved over the past 50 years, but if you don’t measure your own personal progress, any type of measurable improvement in society will be meaningless to you. You can’t appreciate any other progress going on around you if you’re not measuring, and therefore conscious of, your own.
Falling behind certainly feels bad:
There’s no in-between feeling when it comes to personal progress; if you don’t feel like you’re moving ahead, you feel that things are moving on without you, passing you by.
If you’re not feeling good about what you’re doing, your mind might go to a place where you start comparing your- self to other people you think are doing better. But mea- surements comparing yourself against others just cause unhappiness. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
The purpose of measurement is to have right thinking around the results you’ve achieved. For this reason, all
of my measurements are based on things to do with me personally or with my company, where I’ve had a major influence in bringing about an improvement, or where we can learn something specific from why we didn’t hit certain goals.
We all know the phrase, “Mind your own business.” Well, my new motto is, “Measure your own business.” When you make sure all of your measurements are against yourself, you’ll move toward your goal of increased progress, learn- ing, and growth. Good things don’t come from measuring yourself against anyone else.
Each of us is on our own:
You’re the only person who can be responsible for designing and achieving the future you want.
No one else has the experience of your past to use as raw material for measurement when and how you’re planning ahead and setting goals.
Always Remember To Expand Your Gain:
You love that what you previously thought was an embarrassing weakness can now be one of your biggest strengths.
It’s more than likely that by the time you read this, you’ll have done a fair amount of living, working, and achieving already, but this doesn’t make this new understanding of the right way to look at your progress any less beneficial to you now.
Looking back at all the times you felt unsatisfied or like you’d failed, doesn’t it feel good now to know that it was really because you didn’t know the right way to measure the progress you’d made and not because you hadn’t actually been successful? This is all positive. There’s no blame to be attached for your being in the Gap to this point.
Even if you were raised in a Gain-minded household, you could easily have picked up Gap-like thinking from the culture that was otherwise around you. After all, measuring backward is counterintuitive to most people.
There’s no good reason to think along the lines of, “If only I’d had the switch in the right position this whole time!” The only thing to do now is to recognize why and how you had the switch in the wrong position, and then to flip it to the right position and keep it there going forward.
You can’t measure an ideal because there’s no number or event attached to it. Ideals exist in a timeless zone, a realm that isn’t measurable. You have a lot of room for timeless zones and for inspirational things, but you don’t get them confused with measurement, and ensure that my confidence and capability are based on measurement.
JOE
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