✔ Got 10 GPA in 10th standard

✔ Cleared JEE entrance exam

✔ Got placed in an S&P 500 company

✔ Got my research published


You see, right from the beginning, this habit of measuring success in terms of milestones is hardwired into our brains. It’s almost like we have been made to believe that milestones will allow you to move from point A to B, where B is the place that will add more value to your life and make you feel more successful. This is a fairly reasonable argument for all practical reasons, but we haven’t been taught how to quantify our transition from A to B, which I will explore in this article.

Our current quantification of this transition is like a unit step function that is incremented every time we have achieved a new milestone. The satisfaction/security of which is very short-lived and eventually dies until we are onto some other high. This will become more clear from the graphs below:


blog1.PNG


The downside to approach is it fails to build an overall sense of security. This is more of a hedonic adaptation that will bring momentary spikes in your satisfaction and security levels but will have little to no impact on your overall state of being. A better approach can be to devise a system to monitor the positive delta changes that we achieve on a daily/weekly basis. A classic example of this can be our approach towards fitness goals. Instead of measuring our weight after every gym session, we should focus more on the number of reps or the extra weight we are able to lift each day. Now, here’s how the graph will change in that case:


blog2.PNG


The question then arises, how to devise such a system? What all basis should be covered. Two things are needed to be addressed:

  1. We should ensure that we don’t have a narrow vision of what can be achieved within that field. This can be done by being in a constant feedback loop with someone who has expertise on that subject and can be trusted. You can consider him as a mentor/coach.
  2. Apart from this feedback, keep looking for things that you can do differently, which will allow you to add your creative flavor and help you understand the depth of the subject.

With this, you can hopefully add weight to your daily success quotient and will feel a sense of security and confidence over your final achievement.

“Maybe it is not about sprinting from place A to B and then taking a long pause but rather,

about keep walking from place A to B to C and so on …..”