What failing 2022 made me realize.
This has been a good year to start with (2023). I’ve been feeling a sense of growth and achievement to start off with. My habits have been in place, and I am taking my health seriously. But, for sure this is not the result of consistency from the previous year, it is a result of failure which I felt at the end of 2022. Yes, in some of the aspects of life which I really value, I failed 2022.
To start off with, I had made some goals for 2022. The sad part is I don’t even know what those goals were, completion of them comes later. This came as a huge shock to me as I was wrapping up my year. I’ve been a reader since last few years but in 2022 reading wasn’t a major part of life. I didn’t want that. Secondly, I’ve always been a runner but the previous year it was not happening so consistently for me to reach a level of satisfaction. In conclusion, I did not take care of my health, was not focusing on things which I feel make me grow and ultimately not holding myself accountable and responsible. Obviously, there were things I grew in, but this is my learning which I want to share.
The thing with realizing that you have failed is you don’t want to feel like that, and you want to start things all at once; every good habit you’ve followed and the ones you have recently become aware of, everything at once, because till now you’ve been living in one extreme, now you want to jump to another. This is the biggest mistake people make, or certainly I did previously but it shouldn’t be like that. You start off with the bare minimum of what you have to achieve. This is the least that you could expect of yourself to begin with. You do that for a month then think of increasing it to the next stage. The tendency to set unrealistic expectations when we are highly motivated itself sets us up for failure. We should always start small even when we are motivated to do more because we would always want to achieve equilibrium. That’s what we have to realize before we set any goals because we may be hard on ourselves for a particular period of time but that doesn’t help us achieve sustainability. Discipline with flexibility when we are starting anything helps us achieve sustainability at that particular habit so that we can reap it’s benefits in the long run rather than quitting it out of frustration of failing to meet unrealistic expectations. Always remember, committing yourself to something for a long time rather than focusing on daily progress is a recipe for failure.
