Intro: The Endstate-Part 1

I've been in grad school for a long time. In fact, it feels like I'm on the seven year plan. A lot of people go to school for seven years, you may say. Yes, but those people are called doctors.*

A couple of years ago in class, our professor went over the answers to our mid-terms having passed out the graded exams. As the class was dismissed there was one student who approached the professor and began vehemently disagreeing with her grade. She was obviously distressed having put in a lot of time studying, yet having not achieved her goals. She left the room without resolution and was clearly spending emotional effort. There were most likely internal and external forces that defined her endstate success by that grade.

I hoped that someday she would have perspective on her situation and she would see that the grade would have much less effect on her future than many other factors. But that didn’t change her immediate feeling of effort not equating to success. I walked away thinking that we often don't understand the endstate we're striving for, and it led me to two core thoughts. The first being:

1. Despite considerable effort, “success” may never be achieved.

First of all, we don't have to define "success" too stringently. We can just call it any desired endstate to which we commit effort. And this core thought is a result of so many different things: we may not truly understand what it takes to achieve the endstate, we may not have the capabilities to achieve the endstate, or there are other random factors in our lives that prevent achievement. In any case, we often struggle without understanding why we're not succeeding, why we don't escape the bounds of our current state.

Source

Think of a mountain with “Good” at the bottom and “Great” at the top. To achieve greatness you must exert effort to roll a boulder up the mountain. Only by getting the boulder all the way to the top do you achieve your desired outcome, at great effort nonetheless. Anything short of that, no matter the effort expended, the boulder rolls back to the bottom, or back to a state of “Good.” Like the Greek myth of Sisyphus, we are condemned to an eternity of rolling the boulder uphill over and over again only to have it roll back to “Good” every time. Or like the Coyote who never gets the Roadrunner despite great effort. Pick your analogy.

We'll talk about the second core thought in the next post.

*The first person to comment with the name of the movie the line above is from will receive a free Sisyphus “That’s How I Roll” T-shirt (should you actually want one). For the record that's not me in the picture.

Song of the Day

In honor of rolling a stone and the pressure of ideal, perfect states, the song of the day is The Rolling Stone’s “Mother’s Little Helper.”