Metaphors for Accomplishment

I have been contemplating accomplishment; to be exact, how should you approach thinking about it? How do you know where you are, relative to your goal? How can you use your mental model of accomplishment to motivate yourself?

Oddly enough, this topic isn’t something I’ve considered in the past. I have spent most of my life in a school setting, where the notion of accomplishment – over time – was very fuzzy; and almost non-existent in the academic environment. Most school assignments have a binary status: done and not done. We only need a binary status because they’re short enough to be finished in a single session. While a few students in high school and college write their papers weeks beforehand and go through extensive editing processes, the vast majority do not; and it is the vast majority who set the average.

Correspondingly, I haven’t needed to consider accomplishment beyond those terms, most of the time. I’ve been able to get by through extending the notion of a binary status to projects; where each project is broken up into multiple pieces, and then each piece is either done or not done.

I have only recently come to the conclusion that this method of thinking about projects is a very poor one.

The most egregious problem with it is that this method does not encourage partial work. That is, spend 5 or 10 minutes on the project. Instead, the binary method encourages block scheduling of time. Needless to say, block scheduling is not only hard to arrange when one is busy, but it leaves a lot of time in the day fallow. Too small to really accomplish anything in, so why even try?

So I have been searching for a replacement metaphor. And I think I have a decent one: rock climbing. I’ve been toying around with the classic idea of “chipping away at the old block,” but I think that’s too limited. There are two key advantages in the rock climbing metaphor: (1) hanging there is bloody hard work, and (2) it’s possible to take a wrong path, and need to back-track a bit. It also implies the need for research to discover the right path.

The advantage of this metaphor is that it implies that there is a finite amount of work, and any work done to move onward is never wasted – no matter how small. If you’re holding on to a rock face, then each and every handhold matters – and making just the next grip might be the difference between success and failure.

I’m going to try and use this metaphor from now on.