Jargogled Impressions.

It’s so hard to keep up with a habit, even when you want to. Life, as they say, comes in the way. And other things take a priority. But as long as you have a general awareness of how to get back on track, they say all is good. And to be kind to ourselves when that happens, which happens all too often, in order to give us the space for us to indeed come back to the habit if it is important to us.

What is important to us keeps changing, and yet it does not. Things may seem like to be changing a lot, when in fact, they are deviating only marginally from the median.

But that’s hard for us to figure out in the moment. It takes years to understand if this was so, and when we do, we have moved on to a place where we feel things are indeed changing. And so, the cycle continues. Like a Sisyphean ordeal.

It’s funny when people don’t realize this is so, which is not very uncommon. In fact, many do not, and continue leading a life of an inaccurate but effective nonchalance. Like many other things, the curse of the mediocre rears its ugly head here too – those that realize this is so, and yet are unable to do anything about it, are worse off than those that do not realize it, or are careful enough to not internalize it. Funny how that works.

How things seem and how they work are often dangerously de-coupled. This makes these things difficult to make progress on and important to understand and internalize that we should keep progress separate from perfection.

When we are chasing perfection, we keep our heads in the sky. We get intimidated and we get overwhelmed and we get dis-illusioned.

But when we are chasing progress, we are keeping our eye on the prize, but we are also aware of the ground realities. We are taking one step at a time, slowly but steadily making progress in the direction we want to proceed.

Our thinking and our aspirations should be like a compass, pointing us generally in the right direction. A compass does not know what the final destination is, it can help us point towards it. And it does not care too. Because the final destination can change, is open to interpretation, and can shift and modify as we age or we learn more.

In that sense, all of our efforts should be to take that next step in the direction compass is pointing at. In hiking, they say one step at a time is all you need. In running they say one foot in front of the other. Which is to say that we should endeavor to keep taking the steps, the tiny, immeasurable steps that helps us keep making progress.

Progress not perfection.

Making progress sounds easy, but we get dissuaded when the delta is miniscule or unclear as to what our effort will lead up to. Most pursuits are built that way. Most that are worthwhile anyways.

The problem here is with focus and with attention. The more signals you bring in to your perceptive radar, the more difficult it becomes to make progress, because then your progress is so spread out that is humanely impossible to even notice it. The trouble is that as information has become cheap, we are exposed to the practices of the elite and the outliers, This, coupled with the idea of a plastic mind is a volatile cocktail that defies any attempts at maintaining focus.

Our attention has value, and it is reflected in the words we use. We ‘pay’ attention.

Attention is also often a prelude to action. So, in advertisement, this becomes the oldest question all the Madison Avenue folks were chasing back in the days – how to get attention. We pay attention to do (or to buy).

It’s true also in the innumerable meetings you partake in that is the bread and butter of corporate jobs. We pay more attention with an executive in the meeting. We pay more attention in meetings we have a stake in. We pay more attention in meetings we want to be in on an ongoing basis. Because paying attention means knowing something valuable, or being able to take action – by speaking out, by following up, or by making a change.

I wonder if by pausing, we can inculcate the habit of paying attention. The New Yorker had this interesting article last week on attention including description of a group of art lovers who unite in museums and art exhibition under a thoroughly elaborate game of rituals and secrecy, to spend time with popular and arcane works of art as a sort of defiance against the relentless pace of the modern age. Through pausing and realizing the work of art, the coterie aims to counteract the attention deficit plague. And in so doing, are crafting a path of productive endeavors by translating the activities from a sub-culture to a mass market phenomenon.

But if we pause every so often, then what makes that different from stopping and smelling the roses? Isn’t pausing then an excuse for not making progress? We should just smell the roses when we are octogenarians looking to kill time right?

If only our mentals models were an exact representation of the world around us. We confuse the map for the territory when really the map is just a blunt representation of the world around us built for a specific purpose. The same is true for what we believe can drive us towards meaning and purpose, towards 42. The complex, inter-woven webs of activities and its probabilistic outcomes are tantamount to an uncertainty that’s hard to quantify and understand. Instead of rational calculation, a willing suspension of it often does far more to bring progress. As we build new habits, retire old ones, and maintain the good ones, we are better off listening to that which demands our attention and being aware of when it does. That way, you can bring the entire corpus of your attention to it. And when that happens, only good things shall follow.