You Don't Need to Have Lofty Goals to Succeed
In fact, the more ambitious the goal, the greater the chances of failure rather than success -- while those who set modest goals for themselves, are likely to succeed at them all the time, thereby conditioning themselves with success.
This is a very important concept to understand -- and the reason people fail, and set themselves up for failure: they have to succeed, at whatever they are doing, and not rationalizing their failures with unrealistic, noble goals -- because what matters, is what they actually do, and not what they intend to do, but so far have not achieved, and ultimately, have no intention of doing so. An apt observation, is that the road to failure (folly) is paved with many good intentions.
It is not so much that one succeeds by setting a new personal best for weight lifted -- as they do just by showing up each day at the gym/health club, and while they are there, can just putter around on the machines for 30 minutes -- just by osmosis, since that is what other people there will invariably be doing. That is an inescapably healthy environment -- if nothing else, for that exposure to people involved in healthful activities and objectives, and being around healthy people as role models.
If we truly want a health care system that works, we'd pay for that access for everyone -- rather than the astronomical health care costs of those who avoid those venues and possibilities. Daily attendance at such venues, would be mandatory -- to collect whatever other government assistance they are receiving -- such as unemployment benefits, etc. One has to maintain their condition for employment -- even while not having a job. And while they are at it, they can get into good habits like keeping the machines clean -- for their own use, as well as maintaining a "work ethic" -- and that is that one actually has to do something, to make any difference in one's life, and in the world -- and not just demand it from others.
That's not how a healthy world works. -- and that is the ultimate meaning and fulfillment of society -- and not just getting more than one's fair share of government funding, as the people of famously dysfunctional societies think. So then, everything they do seems to be arbitrary -- without meaning and purpose, other than having to do so because everybody tells them that is how to play the game -- so that is what they become good at.
In that way, many mistake "health care" for health -- which means being without the problem, rather than always requiring a greater and more expensive solution -- which merely continues the problem. Predictably, one finds that in such "solutions," the problem(s) grow even worse -- requiring more money and professionals for their own lifelong job security. Some people grow up entirely in that world of dysfunction and dependency -- and never even begin to suspect that there can be any other way of being.
No one is going to bring that enlightenment for anybody else; -- no matter how much they insist that they are so selfless. Each individual, in the course of their life, will have to attain that understanding and liberation for themselves -- by thinking for themselves, and not just repeating the words they have been "taught" as the only truth they should ever know.
More than anything else, that is the importance of doing and practice -- that is one's conditioning for the life one will probably live and actualize, and not the life that doesn't work, but for which there are new explanations for its failures -- as though that makes a difference.
Starting Over Again
For those starting exercise programs after a long period of inactivity, or enhancing a lifelong maintenance program, the best way to go about it, is not to envision themselves a year or a month down that path, but merely to commit to one week -- and if done diligently, all subsequent progress will result from that. So it is very important to get that first week right -- and that conditioning becomes a habit, that no amount of wishful thinking can substitute for. That conditioning strategy works for just about any changes one wishes to make in their lives -- the one week commitment.
Although that sounds too easy to be true -- a week of actual change, is far more effective and powerful, than any amount of just intending to change, if one is forced to it. Unfortunately, most people will never change unless they are forced to it -- which means they have not embraced the change, as the person who wills to do so, and actually carries it out through their actions -- if only for a week, but that one week, is reality, and not just wishing it were so.
In this world, many confuse the image (wishful thinking), for the reality, or truth of the matter -- in never finding out. To such people, that they think it so, makes it so, and that the world they live in -- and when given the choice between the illusion and the actuality, will prefer the illusion over the actuality, which then becomes their delusion of success and well-being. Those are hard habits to break -- and why one who hopes to change anything, must actually effect that change -- once, and preferably over a week of daily practice (conditioning), to effect and implant that change successfully -- which seems strange at first, but that is all that is required.
That is the proverbial first step, that many never take -- and wonder why nothing changes, and particularly, that they don't change -- as much as they wish it would. No amount of wishing, will effect the change that actually doing them -- will make.
And so those really earnest in producing change, will make it as easy as possible to effect -- and not difficult at first, and then increasingly more difficult. The right conditioning program, makes change, increasingly easy -- so that change is the easiest thing to do, while the ineffective ways, require much more energy to effect -- for little or no positive benefits and results.
Thus changes are much more likely to be successful, if they seem minor rather than traumatic, and becomes the new reality -- because it is easier, and more productive. But people who have been conditioned to always do things the hard way, will think that any change, must be even harder -- and reflexively prefer not to undergo that trauma, which stunts them for the rest of their lives, and brings about the steady deterioration many experience as the only change they think is possible in the world. So their preference is always for the least change possible -- thinking that nothing good can ever come of change. Then then become the defenders of the status quo -- all the while, all the while fancying themselves as the vanguard of progressive thought and enlightenment.
That is the challenge of every generation -- not to become the defenders of the status quo, and the agents against change -- that produce and results in their own destruction, because in order for life to remain vital and vibrant, one must be changing all the time. To remain static, is to become dead -- to all the change and life about them -- in the self-isolation that has become the disease of our times -- in the physical handicaps that preclude us from participation, but also, mentally and socially, as we become disconnected even from our own bodies.
That begins with the divisions and the fragmentations of reality into the many unconnected parts -- instead of the integral drive for wholeness and integration of the new into the old -- and not the constant battle of the old against the new, ensuring that nothing new can ever supplant the old. That's how people and things age. There is no provision for assimilating the new, processing the new -- as the new, and better -- but insisting that everything new is merely the old, and must fit into the old categories, and business as usual.
That's how life has changed -- to a new, better reality, but one must embrace that change, and allow that such things are possible, or surely, the more things change, the more they will stay the same -- until that society and its individuals, disintegrate from the stresses -- of denying the new realities whose time has come.
