The greater part of our daily lives
can be summarized under the heading of goal fulfilment.
We are constantly in the process of
fulfilling goals.
It does not matter if we ourselves
actively think of our lives this way or not; it is an appropriate
characterization nonetheless.
Even the act of getting out of bed,
or going to it, is the fulfillment of a goal; making the bed, preparing
breakfast or acquiring it somewhere along the way of travel to work, to school,
to wherever we are called to be, those are all goals. They are goals that we do
not think about (much), because for most of us they have become routinized,
habitual, and unconscious behaviors.
Ordinary functions like our morning
regimen, may be so habitual that we do not even think about them.
We may find that we have performed
some of our daily tasks, without even realizing that we have done them; like
driving to work, taking the left turn at the corner, merging onto the highway,
suddenly we are parking the car, and all the while, during the entire commute
we have been thinking about other things.
Nevertheless, we were driving with
a goal in mind: to get to work, and we completed numerous, tiny, nearly
invisible goals all the way in.
In sum: goal fulfillment is life,
and life is goal fulfillment.
Goals may be small, near term and
able to be accomplished with virtually unconscious effort.
Goals may be large, long term, far
ranging and difficult.
In both cases, the active principle
in goal fulfillment is discipline.
Discipline is the sustained
marshalling of effort, the focus of the will toward a particular end.
Discipline has a frequency; its
lowest spectrum is represented by normalized, routinized, habitual activities;
its highest spectrum is related to the long-term ambitions that define our lives.
The space and distance between our
present circumstances and our long-term goals must be closed by strategic
thinking.
Strategy has three keys:
One: Understanding yourself
in the present.
Two: Understanding the place
you would like to be.
Three: Understanding
the relationship between the two, knowing that the space and distance between
the present and the future is a field of constant change, continuous flux, and mutability.
Understanding the present requires
an understanding of its antecedents, the choices that were made that brought
you to this place, and the random factors that crept up in your life that either
advanced or set you back in your goals, where they came from and how your
reactions hindered or helped you.
For most of us, the question of how
we live our daily lives comes down to the question of how we navigate the
tension between, and make adjustments to, our range of near term, medium and
long-range goals.
How the interplay between our modes
of living, the choices and behaviors that are unconscious, habitual and routine,
relate to the modes of living that are necessary for the fulfillment of longer
range goals, is what defines us at any given moment in our lives.
Most of us have long and medium
range goals. However, for many of us our long-term goals may only be desires, or
hopes, wishes we have for ourselves that we have no real intention of acting
on.
What differentiates a goal from a
desire or a hope is the degree to which we believe we can actually achieve it,
and the degree to which we actively shape our present lives toward the
fulfillment of it.
And so, we return to discipline.
Discipline is nothing more than the
act of keeping the commitments you have made to yourself.
With daily and constant discipline;
a person is able to follow the map they have drawn for their personal progress,
to steadily advance toward the fruits of those endeavors.
We may become whoever we wish to be
through discipline, the servant of strategy.
Foresight is the companion to strategy,
it begins with self-awareness, knowledge, and understanding.
A person must know who and why they
are, take full responsibility for the actualities of their existence, even
those traits and attributes they possess, which they did not seek, choose for themselves,
and do not desire: our genetic endowment, our cultural heritage,
our relative position on the scale
of poverty and wealth.
Whoever we are, whatever we have
been given, that constitutes the platform from which we launch all our dreams
and ambitions, and by discipline, achieve them.
