Today while I was doing my morning routine this I realized a very core paradox in life. We strive work hard and achieve things and to make progress. The way to do that is very simple we need to abstain from things which is more like a addiction like killing time , watching a movie or drink beers and focus on something which is much more growth related thing like exercising and meditating but the real growth comes from while doing things we we may not like to do. Like making more push ups and meditating for longer than we normally do or make a new goal and work towards to achieve the goal and once we achieve that we look for the satisfaction we get at the end of the goal just to do anything which we like to do which is again a addiction. And as soon as we give in to the addiction we lose very quickly the drive which propelled us to the goal itself. I believe some people call it a plateau and its not easy to break the plateau as the very cyclic nature of it.
The only way to beat this vicious cycle is to make growth the only goal. Any material goal will get us back towards the addiction and we will be stuck in a plateau.
First step towards this is to identify what we like to do if you do not have to do anything at all. It does not necessarily have to sound like sipping a glass of wine or binge watching Netflix. But it can be as benign as just not getting from your bed in time , not doing the chores and watching some nonsense cat video.
So the only way to get out of this cycle of plateau in making is set the goal of growth it-self on any endeavor. Like if you are writing a book then your goal could be write 10 words more than you did last time in the same amount of time. Or replying to all emails 1% faster than you did yesterday and when you see its not moving forward find new tools or ways to improve from others and take best of them.
In my childhood days I had a very bad handwriting and everyone would tell me to improve it but no one told how so I kept repeating the same handwriting for almost in my high school. Then suddenly I way one friend of mine write his name which starts with A (Amrit) in a very nice hand written letter A. And I tried and failed to replicate that A before asking him for help and he taught that A and I repeated that A and I could do it even better after quite some attempts. Now that became a obsession of mine and I will repeat any nicely written letter anywhere I see and just in few months my hand writing became so much better than I could not even recognize my old hand writing in the old days.
The second thing we have to make sure the growth goal has to be measurable and we need to set a periodic weekly/monthly/daily review cycle to ensure we are actually growing as planned.
The only way to beat this vicious cycle is to make growth the only goal. Any material goal will get us back towards the addiction and we will be stuck in a plateau.
First step towards this is to identify what we like to do if you do not have to do anything at all. It does not necessarily have to sound like sipping a glass of wine or binge watching Netflix. But it can be as benign as just not getting from your bed in time , not doing the chores and watching some nonsense cat video.
So the only way to get out of this cycle of plateau in making is set the goal of growth it-self on any endeavor. Like if you are writing a book then your goal could be write 10 words more than you did last time in the same amount of time. Or replying to all emails 1% faster than you did yesterday and when you see its not moving forward find new tools or ways to improve from others and take best of them.
In my childhood days I had a very bad handwriting and everyone would tell me to improve it but no one told how so I kept repeating the same handwriting for almost in my high school. Then suddenly I way one friend of mine write his name which starts with A (Amrit) in a very nice hand written letter A. And I tried and failed to replicate that A before asking him for help and he taught that A and I repeated that A and I could do it even better after quite some attempts. Now that became a obsession of mine and I will repeat any nicely written letter anywhere I see and just in few months my hand writing became so much better than I could not even recognize my old hand writing in the old days.
The second thing we have to make sure the growth goal has to be measurable and we need to set a periodic weekly/monthly/daily review cycle to ensure we are actually growing as planned.
