Friday Five #49

[ornoth]

Sigh. The predictability hurts us.

What was your biggest accomplishment this year?

Probably the thing I’m most proud of is succeeding at raising $3,555 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through my participation in this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge ride. Other noteworthy accomplishments include biking up several hills, including Evans Notch, Great Blue Hill, Mount Wachusett, South Uncanoonuc, and Pack Monadnock; the progress I’ve made getting back into writing for DargonZine; and my exploration of Buddhism.
 

What was your biggest disappointment?

Oddly, the PMC also provides my biggest disappointment of the year, when I crashed out of the event and had to go to the hospital to get stitches. My other cycling disappointment was bonking hard on the way back from a ride to Gloucester. I was also disappointed in that I only had enough submissions to send out five issues of DargonZine this year, and we lost several of our veteran writers and my close personal friends, including Victor, Pam, Bryan, Stu, and Rhonda.
 

What do you hope the new year brings?

The obvious and biggest desire is a new job. Other than that, I hope that the DargonZine crew can finish up the big story arc we began writing at the 2003 Summit, so that I have it to print this year.
 

Will you be making any New Year's resolutions? If yes, what will they be?

I don’t think so. I just finished making two birthday resolutions (regular Buddhist meditation, and transitioning to skim milk), so I don’t think I need additional resolutions. Maybe I’ll eat a little less red meat, since that would probably be the next logical step in improving my diet, but I don’t think that’s big enough to make it a resolution.
 
I will say that I find it disappointing that although people always ask what new resolutions you’re making, they absolutely never ask how well you kept your old ones. As someone with some actual strength of will, I find it sad that most people fail to control themselves and honor their commitments. I think I’ve kept all my resolutions for the past three years (and they haven’t been “gimmes” at all).
 

What are your plans for New Year's Eve?

I was thinking maybe I’d go to the Lizard Lounge to see Flynn, but probably I’ll stay home. I haven’t bothered cultivating many friends, and I’m so not the party type.

Comments

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

I agree, but only to a point. At the consultancy I used to work for, we were all about quantifying goals and plans and measuing our performance. Those are sometimes useful techniques, particularly when you have a large, complex project and don’t trust the people doing the work to tell you the truth.

But that method also comes with its own weaknesses. By establishing measurement criteria, you make achieving the criteria the goal, which can distract you from your true goal. Sometimes you can meet your criteria for success, but fail to actually achieve the objective that it was meant to accomplish. Other times you accomplish the goal, but fall short of the measurement criteria. You’ve accomplished a significant weight loss, but (if I remember right) you fell a pound or two short of your end of year goal; does that mean you failed, or succeeded?

I find setting up measurement criteria is usually too binary for me. In the real world, there’s often no single inflection point between success and failure. There is a huge, broad spectrum between abject failure and complete success, and I trust myself to have the integrity to know where on that spectrum my performance lies. And I usually find it preferable to focus on my real goal than on some arbitrary number that may poorly model my goal.

Of course, some goals lend themselves to measurement, and in many cases it’s important to have a reference point you can manage to and talk about, but I generally find that’s a more artificial setup than simply accepting that there are relative degrees of success.