During one particular year in school, I became very complacent and whiled away my time. Suddenly, one day, I woke up realizing that I had only a few months left for the exams.
So I calculated the hours required to finish the syllabus and came up with a hefty target, implying that I had to study at least 12 plus hrs a day.
But overwhelmed by the target, I kept dithering and procrastinating. And as the days progressed, my ‘asking rate’ kept going up until my study target became almost 20 hrs a day 🙂
Naturally, I gave up and messed up that year.
But what if I had set more reasonable targets? Would I not have done much, much better?
This is one of the paradoxes of goal setting. Everyone tells us that our goals should be ambitious. But if the daily target is unachievable, nothing gets done.
So what is the right approach? Here is my take.
Think of the final outcome as the daily output multiplied by consistency.
In my personal example above, even if I had studied 6-8 hrs with reasonable consistency, I would have aced the exams.
We overestimate how much we can do on any given day but underestimate how much gets done over hundreds of days.
Moderate daily effort, repeated a few hundred times, will often get you to the biggest goals.
– Rajan