Shoot through goals not AT them

[RogueInnovation]

I've been working on a way to make more money from my own budgetting behaviours for a while.
I would money manage every month, budget better, perfect expences until the point my costs and my mistakes were a finely tuned machine.
I almost eliminated months where I would end up short this way and with help from friends eliminated sh#t from affecting me because of someone else's cr#p.

The curious thing however was that, by aiming AT a budget, whenever I would exceed it, I would drop my work load and increase the difficulty of the challenges I would take on. Now days after a long time raising the difficulty level of meeting my subsistancy needs, (I can make my needs in a few precisely spent hours a month, while also spending vast efforts on personal projects) making my challenges more difficult seems excessive. As a result I have been looking for a way to boost my income via my attitude alone and I have found it.

Instead of increasing the difficulty(quality) each time you reach success, you can instead AIM PAST or THROUGH a budget goal.



This might seem obvious, but its not immediately apparent while you are stuck in a budgetting loop, but you can AIM through a budget to reduce the tendency of elevating the quality of your work.

IF you REACH goals, stalling happens, creating a newer version happens, and you have to learn to stop this, by stopping aimin AT a goal, and through a goal towards a consistent metric.

A through goal is "I always work x hard on quality, I always leave y room for other projects and I always store z access as a reminder of how far I have to go"
An AT goal is "I achieved x quality this month, I left y room for it this month, and achieved z savings... oh god, now I'm tired, f#ck it, lets up the demands of the next week, I am going to spend today"


Sometimes an AT goal is very important to ratchet in budgetting abilities and improve time expenditure, but eventually if you never have a "through line" or a through goal, you will get stuck in a loop of reiteration.

To break that loop, you have to shoot PAST the target, and catch the target in the through line.



Its simple maths really, if you are level with your target, and you hit it, the through line is straight.
If your through target is higher than your current target the through line has an incline.

But you cannot achieve a higher end target, if every time you hit a target you reset and make hitting the target level to you harder.



The same is true in writing a novel, and getting into revision hell (where you keep revising a work and never hitting the quality you aim for in the book).
If you aim at perfecting every sentence, paragraph, chapter, your book will become an AT book; it will have a through line that is NEVER higher than your ability to construct ONE sentence or paragraph.

The effect of "AT" writing is that you get better, but under very high pressure, until your sentence structures become over saturated and the writing becomes hard to digest and comprehend, like how Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Rises, became this hard to comprehend and flat story.

Through writing has a very different effect on the end book, and how many revisions it requires.
You do not perfect every sentence or chapter, you start with a character foundation or overview, that must hit a goal, and when it HITS that goal, you discard what you have written in exchange for a "through goal", where you consistently hit similarly themed goals, that are "related" but not the same as the previous accomplishment.

Through writing, like Breaking Bad, can HIT a target goal very soon, and engage a persons desires to be met, but as a writer you have to understand that meeting an audiences desires has consequences on the story, the story must now create a "through line" or process, that still has room to grow.

Breaking Bad, grew by changing its goal from, Walter white makes 700 000 dollars, to walter white wants to live while he's alive, until the point that his goals became egomaniacal until his death ("I'm in the empire business" "skylar I did it for me").

As an audience, we still get the ending where walter white leaves a fortune behind for his children, but its much more bitter, because he lost things along the way and became a "bad guy".
And this forced the story to be more authentic and original and awesome.


The point is, that AT writing is never exposed to needing to be as HONEST as THROUGH writing.


The same is true of budgetting. By meeting your goals, you can either keep, meeting them and resetting the challenge, or you can set a through line that forces you to be honest as you meet your desires.
Rather than perfect sentences or monthly budgets, FACE the fact that the GOAL you are aiming AT will change as you pass THROUGH it.

And along with this challenge will be the desire to just fall asleep at the wheel, set a proper through goal, and plan for evolution and development.


As a result of reaching the end of my ability to refine my monthly budgets, obviously, I must start evolving and developing, and start shooting THROUGH goals, not AT them.



Its not about just having BIG goals, its about that big goal being a through point, as you mature and hit a goal that has benefitted from your evolution as much as your goal setting.

 

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