Welcome to Under 2, an email series delivering short insights to empower your money life – in 2 minutes or less.
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Big goals are great. Defining the gap between where you are and where you’re headed is essential to lay your route to those goals.
But there’s an often-forgotten flipside of going about the journey to your next goal. And that’s the importance of looking back from where you came.
Measuring the distance you’ve already accomplished, whether it’s paying off one of your credit cards, handling a major unexpected expense with a calm head, or the steps you’ve taken advancing in your career, literally illustrates what you’re already capable of – because it’s about what you’ve already accomplished, what you already have evidence of doing.
Don’t let your past be forgotten. Always measure backward.
Benjamin P. Hardy in The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers’ Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success
Taking note of how far you’ve come – in effect identifying evidence of your capabilities to your own mind – powerfully fuels your motivation for those next steps because it increases your agency and confidence. If I can pay off $1,000 in debt, then I can pay off $10,000. If I can save up $5,000, then I can save up $10,000… on and on.
When you connect your next step to your previous steps, instead of measuring yourself only by the distance you have left to go, goals come a little bit easier.
Also, it simply feels better to acknowledge your progress along life’s journey, much better than continual dissatisfaction with the present.
Do you want to reach financial freedom in exhaustion and misery, constantly thinking “If only…?” Or would you rather contentedly march along, enjoying some regular stops to look back at all you’ve already accomplished, on the long road?
You have an ideal in your mind, and you’re measuring yourself against your ideal, rather than against the actual progress you’ve made. This is why you’re unhappy with what you’ve done, and it’s probably why you’re unhappy with everything in your life.
Dan Sullivan in The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers’ Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Under 2, an email series designed to share quick bites of wisdom to empower your financial journey (while challenging me to keep it short).
All for now,
Lindsey