The Goal Gap

“People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.” – Chuck Palahniuk

As a general rule according to experts, it takes 21 days to break a habit; 21 days of complete absence from a routine in order to severely limit the desire to revert back to one’s original patterns, be it behavioral or psychological. These habits, however, are easy to form and maintain since our brains, after a short period of repeated exposure to a routine, turn them into an  automated actions. Have you ever been driving down the road listening to the radio or finishing brushing your teeth only to realize you don’t recall the last 10 minutes on the highway or spitting out your toothpaste? This is an example of how a habit turns into an automated response; sometimes it can be useful, leaving more room in our brains for new, unlearned information; other times it can cause what I like to call The Goal Gap.

The Goal Gap is the monumental difference between the desire to change and actual action being taken towards changing: it is a form of procrastination, which in all irony is something college students state they would like to change about their personalities, but rarely do. It’s almost as if a river is running rapidly between our desires and our actions; a river that takes extreme willpower to even step into, much less cross entirely. As Steve Tobak, managing partner of Invisor Consulting states in his article “Why People Don’t Change”,

“In reality, it took a couple of pretty dramatic personal crises to get me to take a cold hard look in the mirror and decide that I wanted different things out of life. And to achieve them, I would need to spend some quality time actually getting to know my family and myself and enjoy life.”

The idea that it takes a crisis to inspire dramatic change within one’s life is common: many significant individuals in our society have built themselves up from bad experiences or from hitting rock bottom. Robert Downey Jr., lead actor we all know from the Iron Man series, went through a bad experience with drug abuse and Oprah Winfrey became pregnant at the age of 14, contemplating suicide due to the fact. Both went through extreme transformations due to these personal crises.

There are many more examples of these kind of crises that once affected, now incredibly successful people, and the idea remains that the crises were a pattern; a negative routine in those individuals’ lives that inspired them to break free. It allowed them to come to the realization that, although intimidating, breaking the mold of yourself and the environment standing in your path is a necessary risk. This idea can be applied to our daily lives as college students, and although some of us don’t have personal crises quite as severe as the one’s mentioned above, we can still use past hurts as motivation to succeed.

Take, for example, being in an educational rut: your motivation is lacking, procrastination is building, you’re beginning to doubt your major, and the time you’re putting into your school work isn’t showing the immediate effects like that of your part-time job; you’re now contemplating dropping a few classes and putting in more hours at work. You still haven’t thought about the consequences of doing this: prolonged time in school, the risk of not going back to school, the risk of never figuring out what you really love, career-wise, because you’ve become too busy with your additional hours at work.

Another example is not moving forward toward your real dream; it may not be your college major, it may not be a popular career or one that is absolutely secure in today’s economy, but it’s one that you dwell on often; one that inspires you, you enjoy doing, and it doesn’t feel like work. This is what you should be going after, regardless of societal standards, regardless of how scary the change may be if you do pursue it. Remember, your career is something you will be doing for the rest of your life; wouldn’t you want to say you haven’t worked a second of it because you are living your passion?

“There is another layer to the fear of success. Many of us have been conditioned to believe that the road to success involves risks such as ‘getting one’s hopes up’ – which threatens to lead to disappointment.”