Goals vs Plans

People in today's society too often confuse a goal with a plan.  We have become an activities focused society as opposed to a results focused society, and this is one of the biggest roadblocks in people growing and improving physically, financially, professionally, and in some cases, competitively, and it hinders us from accomplishing our goals.

Let's look at a commonplace example.  How many times have we heard "My new year's resolution (goal) is to eat right and exercise twice a week"?  This is a pretty obvious example, but it illustrates how easy it is to confuse a goal with a plan.  Don't get me wrong, wanting to eat right and exercise regularly is certainly noble, but what measures success?  For exercising, the only measurement is "yes I did" or "no I didn't".  A more tangible goal would be "I want to lose 10 lb" or "I want to run a half marathon".

In both cases, the individual would be exercising and improving their diet ideally, but when you have a concrete end state against which you can measure yourself, you are more likely to make the best use of your time when you are conducting your activity, and you actually have a way to check to see if what you are doing is working; to see if you are actually progressing or not.

When it comes to training, I made the mistake of focusing on the activity.  I was ok with just getting on the mats and training X number of times per week, but soon, every training session became the same, and my game became stagnant, because I was always comparing my performance with each partner with the previous performance against that same partner. 

Starting in 2014 I took more of a focused approach.  "I'm going to train tonight" became "I'm going to work on passing tonight" or "I'm going to focus on closed guard" but that was still more activity focused than result focused, even though those areas have seen very drastic improvement over the past 4 months.  Lately, it's become more "I'm going to hit an armbar from closed guard" and "I'm going to do a successful drop-step pass"

The lesson here is to start taking responsibility for results instead of just taking responsibility for the activity.