A Step Ahead
Salutations,
I have decided to change “goals” in my life and actually notice the goals that exist as per my habits. I am genuinely enjoying Adlerian philosophy because maybe it goes very well with my toxic positivity. It is making me think about things that have not been in my mind before — be it the fear of success, hiding from reality, or even understanding how my negative actions act towards a certain goal, or how they achieve a certain goal that may be hidden even to me.
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Based on those learnings and readings, there are multiple thoughts and habits that I have noticed in either myself or others, and also aspects that make better sense to me now. One of those concepts and experiences is taking “a step ahead.” Now, there are multiple synonyms for it: pushing the needle, building blocks, one obstacle after another, so on and so forth, but the underlying aspect is the same. Nothing changes if nothing changes, so make sure things do change.
A way to understand this is through something we learned in physics: the concept of displacement, which is the distance between the start and the end point. You may travel the entire length of the universe and back, and you may still have a displacement of zero. In a peculiar way, even work done is defined by force multiplied by displacement, and even that can result in zero. Hence, a step ahead.
You can look into concepts defined by Atomic Habits, Kaizen, or any other frameworks you are able to map to your lifestyle and mind, but the simplest action stays the same. If a discussion has been ongoing in your mind, a decision has been pending, and you feel stuck with a certain aspect of life, what has changed? If nothing has changed except your thoughts becoming smarter or having more depth, then you are just doing zero displacement on a longer loop. So, change something. Take a step ahead.
A part of me wants to calculate how many times I have said “a step ahead” in this writing, and another part would like to bring this up as an example. I wanted to convert InkKernel from my daily writing dump into a platform where people can write. I just waited on the “perfect” brand strategy for it. I still want to do it and make it happen, but having a smarter, more concise business plan will not inherently help InkKernel. InkKernel is about opinionated writing that comes from human experiences, and I am a human being. So why not just keep on doing the brain dumps, while we slowly map it towards the initial idea, execute on it, and figure out what it may be lacking as we go? Change.
One final aspect that I realized is that “a step ahead” is not a foot ahead, a meter, or an inch. It is not a higher sea level or some other externally defined unit. As individuals, we understand our loops the most. People can notice them, but they cannot draw them out for us. As the person who understands the loops and how the movement changed nothing, all you have to do is figure out what is bringing you back to the same place, and how to break it to take a step ahead. That is it.
