Many mistakes move us forward more than backward. Conscientious people often experience a springboard effect following mistakes, whereby fixing the mistakes accelerates growth faster than if they'd never made any missteps.
For my colleagues and me, whose task it is to improve population health, we architect specific health interventions because doing so gives us a measurement advantage. Through good intervention design, we (or the intervention's facilitators) can track attendance, program completion, vital signs, functional capacity, clinical labs, and downstream health utilization. Yet, despite our best design efforts, we still chronically face a fundamental challenge: program adherence.
Looking back, I think the incident happened because I was at an internal breaking point between who I had been and who I was becoming. It was Blair's first indication that the self-discipline she imposed on herself-insisting that she could do everything perfectly on her own-wasn't healthy. In addition to the significant stress of her high-pressure job, she was also still carrying the grief of losing her partner five years earlier.
Here's something that might sound counterintuitive: people who achieve their goals don't actually take them that seriously. Wait, what? Let me explain. While goal-setters treat their objectives like sacred vows they can't break (and then feel crushed when they fail), achievers approach them more like scientists in a lab. They're curious about what will happen, not attached to a specific outcome.
While goals can create structure in your life, give you something to strive for, and even inspire you, reaching the goal itself is a result of what you do to get there. The actions you take are the process-how you're actually filling the time that is your life. Sometimes, if you're lucky, what you do is fulfilling; it brings out the best in you-your talents, interests, and skills.
