Closing the Gap Between Motivation and Achievement
Motivation is important, but it isn’t enough. You could have all the motivation you need and yet still struggle in perpetuity to achieve a goal. While there is never a guarantee of success in pursuing a goal, there are ways to guarantee progress which in turn increases your chance at success.
Without progress, the chance of success is essentially zero in all but the most obscure cases. As a result, the best way to close the gap between motivation and achievement is with a goal progression.
A goal progression is the process of starting with a step that’s initially easy then gradually moving to steps that increasingly get harder. For example, it’s just not possible to go from sedentary to running a qualifying time for the Boston Marathon overnight. As a result, the goal pursuit plan for running in the Boston Marathon must incorporate a progressive running plan that gradually increases the running distance and speed over multiple months.
This is clearly not rocket science. But unfortunately it’s easy to overestimate what you can do in a day and underestimate what you can do in a lifetime. Therefore, it’s necessary to always remind yourself to not plan for the overnight success story. If it happens, great. However, it’s better to plan for the process of making steady progress. Then having the patience to stick with that process for the long run.