As we approach the year 2020, it’s time for another challenge; this one named after the age-old adage – ‘Hindsight is 20/20’. The saying is often used as a way to encourage us to live in the moment and to prevent excessive rumination. You can’t change the past, and spending too much time reviewing mistakes can be detrimental to success. However, reflection is a core element of any successful venture-to-be. If there’s any venture that we wish to be successful, it’s the challenges we present to ourselves. You know, like New Year’s Resolutions.
New Year’s Resolutions are notorious for their insanely high failure rate. Still, we’re going to try to end up on the winning side of the stats with a quick change to the formula. The Hindsight Challenge adds a pre-resolution attempt. By adding this extra step, we gain an opportunity to fail (or succeed), reflect, and improve. Here’s how to do the Hindsight Challenge:
- Challenge yourself to complete a pre-resolution for New Years by finding something that you’d like to change.
- Do your best to work at your challenge until the new year.
- On New Year’s (or slightly after), reflect on your progress. Why were you successful or unsuccessful? What can you change about your process so that you’re more likely to succeed next time?
- Update your challenge/process/plan and try again.
The ideal challenge is something that you’ve either failed to achieve before or something that you consider to be slightly outside of your ability to accomplish. Be wary of selecting a challenge that is gated simply by time, such as losing 100 lbs in a month or being awake for 26 hours a day. Your goal should be achievable. Perhaps try to 100% a game or attempt a particularly difficult Achievement such as a no-hit run of Dead Cells.
Once you’re working on the challenge, consider journaling or marking your progress. The secondary goal of the challenge is to work on the core elements of the decision-making process: reflection and improvement. When we take time to look back at our efforts, it will be much easier to identify helpful adjustments if we have something to measure against.
Finally, don’t hesitate to give this a try in the future as well. We have an extra month of headway for the official challenge, but if your goals call for more time, then give yourself that time.
For this challenge, I’ll be resolving to write and publish 50 articles in a month. This is an extraordinary amount of writing for me. Still, it seems like it should be within the realm of possibility. Historically, I’ve not been able to finish goals like this, but I’ll have an opportunity to fix any problems I run into later. Keep an eye out for an update in the New Year.
Best of luck out there and remember: Keep choosing to be more than the sum of your parts! >Σ
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