Don't Confuse Motion With Progress

You can burn 200 litres of fuel and spend 20 hours behind the wheel without getting any closer to your destination. Life works the same way: motion isn't progress.

How do you substantially improve your life?

There’s one thing that keeps a lot of people stuck in place and makes them spin their wheels through life.

People often confuse real progress with chaotic motion.

Here’s an example. When we need to drive from point A to point B, we need clear reference points telling us we’re heading in the right direction. We need either a navigation app or road signs.

If we’ve burned 200 litres of fuel, spent 20 hours behind the wheel and racked up a huge mileage but haven’t got any closer to our destination, then we’ve simply wasted our resources. So you can be in very active motion and yet the whole process is completely pointless, because we’re moving in the wrong direction.

Plenty of people are extremely busy: they’re constantly doing something, calling someone, meeting someone, buying something and then selling something. In general the process is active — but the results they want aren’t there.

Through all of it the person genuinely gets tired and may even be trying hard, but the fact remains: they’re not getting any closer to their goals.

So it isn’t enough to be in constant flow and active motion. You have to ask yourself: “Am I even heading the right way? What result should there be by the end of this week or month?”

When we have deadlines, numbers and a plan, it’s easy to see that we’ve missed them and change our approach.

But when there are no metrics and no checkpoints at all, you can spend years doing unproductive things while living under the illusion of active growth.

That’s why, as soon as we learn to tell real progress apart from motion in no particular direction, we’ll get to the life we want far faster.

Are there areas in your life where you feel you’re spinning your wheels? Do you have any checkpoints on the way to your goal?