Expecting instant gratification can often work against you and your goals.
A large part of us would love to believe that we can achieve many of our goals in a fast time frame. Some of them can meet this timeframe, depending on factors such as the types of goals and available resources such as time. However, many larger goals cannot be achieved in a short amount of time.
Writing a book can take a short amount of time if appropriate, consistent effort is given to delivering a quality book with a clear purpose and end goal for the reader. It might take a month, or it might take six. In either case, speed shouldn’t be the focus of your efforts, or be the matric on which success is measured.
Instead, the focus should be on progress.
Consider a goal of losing 100 lbs. This is something that cannot be healthfully achieved in a short amount of time. In this case, it’s best tackled with a series of small steps toward the larger goal.
We have a tendency to focus on the destination and if it seems that it would take a long time, excessive focus on that destination in pursuit of a long-term goal will lead to discouragement and the temptation to give up will creep in. The message that’s being internalized is that it’s such a long distance away that any immediate effort seems futile.
In these cases, the key to ensure that you succeed at reaching your goals is to not focus on the destination, but the progress you make along the way – your journey, is where your focus should be. You might not see the destination on the horizon, but you can see twenty feet in front of you. In the case of weight loss, losing five pounds in two weeks is great progress towards the goal.
Milestones are vital to keeping you on track as you work towards your larger goals.
I strongly recommend you take a large goal and break it down into smaller milestones, especially if you’re prone to getting discouraged or feel you lack the passion to undertake a large goal. Losing 10 pounds is a manageable goal, on the way to losing that 100. Break it down into manageable chunks.
Our modern age wires us for instant gratification and it expect it in many aspects of our lives. Rather than fight against it, make that work to your advantage by shooting for the small milestones on your way to the larger, longer-term goals.
Milestones also allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your methods. For example, it takes you 3 weeks to lose 10 pounds. On the way to the next ten, you find that it took 4.5 weeks. You can compare the first milestone to the second, and look at what might have changed? Did certain events curtail your diet? Is your body getting used to your diet and starting to adapt, signaling you to make some changes to your diet & exercise strategy? Possibly. Since weight loss doesn’t happen at a static speed, perhaps weight loss will be slower as you move forward towards your longer goal.
Of course, this can apply to any large goal, not just losing a large amount of weight.
To give you the bottom line in a nutshell: Discouragement is the main enemy when you tackle longer-term, larger goals. Milestones that break down the goal into manageable chunks are a great way to keep you on the path and to monitor your progress, allowing you to adjust your approach if you need to without getting discouraged.