Winning  

We have been playing an inordinate amount of Mario Kart at the Lowe house over the past month on the wii. Ethan has been getting better and better the more he plays and is starting to get competitive, like really competitive. He gets mad if he doesn’t make it to the finish line on his final lap. He yelled at me for beating him not long ago saying "I wanted to win!", it's cool to see him getting so passionate about something. The weird part is that as competitive as he acts, he still hasn't connected the dots between how he drives and the place he finishes in the race. So basically the race will start, he will sit and watch Steph and I race for a minute, maybe comment on what we are doing or what’s happening, then he'll start driving. Usually he will see something on the track he wants to check out and drive his car off the road or backwards to go check it out. He does all of this and still gets upset when he doesn't win, no matter how many times we tell him he can't win the race driving backwards.

I can so relate to this. I am a very goals oriented person. I set goals and do what it takes to make them happen, I like things to be planned out. With that comes the constant threat of not just getting off target, but making sure that what you are doing is moving you closer to the center of the target. Having a goal in place, and doing the things it takes to achieve it are two completely different things. I have to constantly evaluate my efforts and gauge the results from them against the goal I'm trying to achieve.

I think that many times people give up on their goals because they struggled to achieve them for years and never got any closer, generally assuming the goal was too big. My guess is the methodology being used to achieve the goal was the problem, not the size of the goal.