Habits & Goals
I’ve started to deeply think about the connection between goals and habits, mostly due to the fact that I have been building a habit tracking application for a while.
I think that sometimes goals get a bad reputation, and there is a school of thought out there that habits are the solution to everything.
After all:
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle
But, goals are not to be thrown away, as they can work with habits. Goals are simply a way of looking at habits in a time bound manner.
So, for instance, you may say that you want to have a habit to do daily pushups. You can then set a goal to do 1,000 pushups a month, which translates to roughly 33 pushups per day.
It is unlikely that you will do exactly 33 pushups each day, but with a goal you can track the hypothetical linear trend line towards your goal over time, and then see your actual progress based on the habits that you execute each day.
What I am not sure is whether habits are a means to an end (i.e. a goal) or an end in themselves.
