How to Aim for Good Goals

When the new year comes, everyone has plausible goals in mind, but they often fail. It’s common to slack off and give up halfway. People ignore their initial determination, procrastinate day after day, and eventually just give up. Even while giving up, they fail to focus on what truly matters. That’s why you need to immerse yourself in one important task. It might seem too basic and perhaps even cliché. However, just as a house built on shaky ground will collapse, without the foundation of immersion, anything you build will eventually fall apart.

The Goal I Want and the Choices

You need a clear goal. Having a goal of what you want to achieve by a certain point creates a sense of purpose. You also need to consider the opportunity costs that you cannot choose once you’ve made a decision. Opportunity costs must be clearly discarded. In “Interstellar,” Cooper says the following line:

“Newton’s Third Law. You have to leave something behind to go forward.”

If you have a desired goal and want to focus your energy on it, you must boldly discard any distracting elements. This applies even if they are things society values highly, like school, stability, or a job.

Immersion and Eliminating Fear

Immersion provides efficiency beyond imagination. As a software developer, you might have experienced creating a feature by being completely immersed for several hours.

In fact, humans are animals that survived in environments where immersion was difficult. There were fierce beasts outside, and food supplies were always running low. That’s why the brain developed the amygdala, to regulate immediate responses when threats are detected. When the amygdala is activated, the rational pathway to the prefrontal cortex is blocked. It’s the worst for immersion. To immerse yourself, fear must first be eliminated.

While some people are naturally bold in taking on new tasks, most are not. However, there is no way to eliminate fear. 1. Just do it, and 2. Face it. It’s similar to when a journalist asked Yuna Kim how she achieved such outstanding results, and she replied, “I just do it.”

Keep Moving Forward

It’s such an obvious statement, but there are times when we hesitate to move forward. If you focus on immediate pleasures and don’t move forward, you won’t achieve your goals. There’s a saying I always remind myself of whenever I become lazy. It’s something Richard Feynman said in an interview.

_ You ask me if an ordinary person by studying hard would get to be able to imagine these things like I imagine.

Of course. I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There’s no miracle people. It just happens they got interested in this thing, and they learned all this stuff. They’re just people. There’s no talent or special miracle ability to understand quantum mechanics or a miracle ability to imagine electromagnetic fields that comes without practice and reading and learning and study. So if you take an ordinary person who’s willing to devote a great deal of time and study and work and thinking and mathematics, then he’s become a scientist.

If you ask me, “Can an ordinary person study hard and think about the things you think about?” I would answer like this.

Of course. I am just an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracles. I just happened to be interested in this thing and learned all this stuff. They are just people. There is no miracle ability to understand quantum mechanics or electromagnetic fields without practice, reading, and learning. So if an ordinary person is willing to devote a great deal of time and study and work and thinking and mathematics, then that person can become a scientist. _