Too often we set ourselves these major goals in training, weight loss, career, life and solely focus on getting to that place, wherever it might be. You want to live in that perfect house, earn a certain amount of money, get to a certain weight, reach a certain body fat percentage… It’s the same cycle over and over again, ‘once I get to [insert any goal anyone has ever had] it will be perfect, then I am happy’.
It resembles the worm game on old Nokia mobile phones: you promise yourself that once you get to 100 points; which meant that the worm had to eat 100 apples without crashing into walls or itself as the tail kept growing with each apple it ate; you’re done playing. But once you got to 100 you were like “once I get to 150 I’ll stop”. It was a never-ending vicious cycle. I spent a lot of my youth chasing those digital apples on the screen.
Once you get to your ultimate goal of “perfectness” it doesn’t necessarily feel that extraordinary as you thought when setting up that goal. So you set yourself another goal and start the same process again: ‘once I get to [insert any goal anyone has ever had] it will be perfect, then I am happy’.
We think that there is some sort of magical place that if we just keep grinding away eventually we reach that perfectness that we are looking for. What we forget is to appreciate NOW and where we are at this very moment. Some of us live our whole lives trying to get somewhere but never stop and think how good everything is where we are just at this very moment. In the end those people are never truly satisfied with what they have because they always feel like their life is missing something, that magic ingredient that would make everything just perfect.
I think it is extremely important to stop as often as possible and just be happy with what you’ve got. I’ve written about gratitude journal in the past in HERE but you don’t even have to do that. Just learn to be happy where you are. Just really think how good things are instead of what’s wrong or what’s missing. So you might not be down to 10% body fat but how much different would your life actually be if you got there?
This doesn’t mean that you should stop setting goals and just give up on life. I think that constant self improvement is important. But don’t fall into thinking that once you get to your goals life will be perfect or that you will feel as now this is enough.
Forget what other people think as ideal and what is the universal standard for being successful: how you should look, what weight you should be, what body fat you should be. Digging even deeper, people expect you to earn a certain amount of money, own a house in a certain area or to drive a certain car. These are all external reasons. You are living your life trying to impress other people instead of trying to find internal happiness. The question is: are you happy or are you just doing all these things to live up to someone else’s standards? Is the society telling you how your life has to be in order to be successful and happy. Are the health and fitness magazines telling you how you should look?
Stop and think about it. When will you feel satisfied with where you are? Have you set yourself a mountain to climb and think that once you get there your life will be perfect? Is it another degree, that promotion, dropping the last three kilograms? In the words of the great Kenny Powers, “let me hit you with some fucked up truth”: once you get to that mountain top there will be another higher mountain behind it and another behind that. And it is fine to keep climbing them but don’t think that there will be a time when you’ve climbed enough mountains and will reach that ultimate peak.
There never will be that moment unless you consciously start focusing on having contentment with what you’ve got, how you look and how your life is.
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