When we confuse process with result

Here's the scenario: you decide to spring clean your closet / hall cupboard / stationery store. You pull everything out to see what's in there, and have it all spread over every available surface at the point where your blood sugar falls through the floor or you're called away to another task. It all starts to feel pointless and counterproductive. You shove it all back in, any old how, and mentally curse yourself for being such a slob that even when you're trying to clean up you're still only making a bigger mess.

Congratulations, you've confused the process with the result. The result is a tidy and organised closet / hall cupboard / stationery store. The process is chaotic and appears disorganised. (People never believe that random looking piles of stuff are a form of order.)

Our new fitness regime is likely to suffer a similar fate. We don't feel (or look) trim, taut, energetic and terrific when we exercise, so when we hit our lowest ebb, we wonder 'what's the point?' We're confusing the result with the process.

Take this human tendency into the field of human relationships and you just know its going to go kablooey.

Can you see this pattern at work anywhere in your life?

A learning experience

Oh dear. I have failed miserably at my 365 day challenge. So much so that I'm officially abandoning it as a Bad Idea.

Three points strike me:

1. It was asking a lot of myself to start an initiative while on holiday away from home.
2. 365 days is - self-evidently - too long be an incentive, so I need a challenge bigger than 100 days, but smaller than 365.
3. If I was doing this for money, I would have no trouble whatsoever with compliance, so I am not as self-motivated as I'd like to believe. (I suspect I am not solo-ing on this point.)

Once I would have felt woefully inadequate and probably abandoned the whole blog because I was such a Useless Failure who did not deserve to pollute the internet with my presence. It would have remained a festering mental loss-of-confidence wound for years. Now at least, I just seek to understand what went wrong, then move on. Middle age has its compensations.

I will keep writing daily while I attempt to come up with a new challenge. Suggestions welcomed, and taken under advisement.