Making Up for Lost Time

I have this tendency to take on a challenge, something that is especially difficult for me, and then expect to have results really quickly. I suppose it can be characterized as impatience, but also as having unrealistic expectations.

For instance, I haven’t really been very regular at blogging for the past few years. Now that I have decided I would like to be more regular, I set myself a target of 3-4 blog posts a week. And of course I am not achieving that. It’s not exactly realistic to assume that going from one post every few months to one every other day is doable in one giant leap.

The other scenario in which I try to make up for lost time is in losing weight. I am sure others do this too, despite the scientific evidence that weight lost too quickly tends to come back on quickly as well. The other day my friend commented: “You didn’t gain the weight in one day, so you can’t expect to lose it overnight either”. Which is really what I forget when I'm setting my targets. And the problem with unrealistic targets is that they can sometimes be off-putting, and thereby counter-productive. You get so intimidated by the difficult target that you don’t end up doing any of it. It’s the all-or-nothing mindset. Far better to do something, make some incremental progress, and over time the increments will add up to an unexpected leap.

Tonight I will follow this advice when going for my walk. I skipped it yesterday because it was too late in the evening for my new program of longer, more intensive walks. I forgot that I could just go for a shorter, easier one, which would really have been far better than skipping it altogether. Hopefully I won’t make that mistake too many more times, before I re-calibrate my expectations.

What aspects of your life are you setting too high expectations and falling far short consistently?