If your destination is 100 meters away, and you consistently walk only half the remaining distance, you’ll walk 50 meters, then 25, 12.5, 6.25, 3.125.... and so on.
In this hypothetical scenario, no matter how many times you make progress, you will never reach your destination as even with infinite progress, these numbers will never add up to 100.
The danger of measuring success only by progress is not that you will never reach the goal, the real danger is that you are always able to make progress towards it; It validates our belief that we are on the right path, and celebrating the wins creates the emotional motivation to keep playing a losing game.
The reason we play these losing games is almost always due to a vulnerability.
Most vulnerabilities are caused by fear or uncertainty. Progress, or the promise of it, alleviates those feelings. So to avoid bad games we have to know our vulnerabilities, and avoid goals that are undefined, or that overly emphasises progress.
Progress is a good thing when it’s directed at a realistic goal that can be achieved. But progress without a goal to direct it often defaults towards a utopia.
A lot of snake-oil can be sold to you before you realize the pursuit of the utopia is a never ending dystopia.
Special thanks to Greg Roworth’s post for the inspiration, and apologies to Apollonius of Perga for butchering altering his math term: Asymptote for my own purposes.
