Embrace Consistency Over Perfection 2024.8.23

Everyone sets goals for careers, family life, financial plans, and personal habits. It’s great to have goals so that when you wake up you feel energetic to do something to achieve your goals. But how can we develop better strategies for setting goals in different areas of life? An outdated method is to divide your big goal into three categories: the final goal, the mid-term goal, and the short-term goal. Beyond this approach, how can we maintain our values or make sure we can keep going toward the success we believe in? Here are three strategies for reference.

1. Reduce the difficult and impossible goals: 

The key to setting goals is to let you know how to ensure you are on the correct path to the goals. Too many challenging goals are hard to break down into little steps and make us feel upset when realizing how far we are still from achieving them. Then, we give up on achieving doing what we want to achieve. Set some reasonable goals at first, and when we have a little progress, set the harder ones.

2. Be consistent: 

Sometimes, it takes decades to become an expert in specific areas. How you can keep on practicing or doing something for a long time is more important than what your goals are. If you can keep on doing certain things consistently over time for a lifetime, you can achieve anything more easily than others. Find a balance between you current achievements and what you are eager to achieve in the future, which can help you keep on learning skills you don’t have now.

3. Be brave about giving up: 

When we realize some goals are not important to us anymore, don’t feel guilty about giving up even if we have spent many hours on them. We can’t achieve everything, but we can always focus on what is the most important. Giving up is not abandoning the efforts we’ve made previously but about making essential progress in our lives,

Especially as adults, we are burned out from job and family responsibilities. Goals are not meant to add more pressure but are intended for a better life we want to have. Feel free to celebrate when achieving a little and don’t put the blame on yourself when failing at something. Hopefully, we can find joy in achieving some goals and continue setting new ones.

How Taiwan's Athletes Flourished at the Paris 2024 Olympics 2024.8.14

Although we won fewer medals this year compared to the Tokyo 2021 Olympics, the Paris 2024 Olympics has been one of my favorite experiences of watching and cheering for athletes from Taiwan. I enjoyed every match and every game, not because we won, but because I noticed that the athletes from Taiwan genuinely enjoyed the competition as well. This is truly special to see because in the past, I felt that athletes from Taiwan were always very nervous on the court and stage. Perhaps they carried too much stress on their shoulders before.

I wonder why athletes from Taiwan are able to enjoy the games more now. First, I think they have gained more international experience. Young athletes must have participated in many professional sports competitions and tournaments over the past three years, which makes the Olympics feel like just another international event. Second, athletes realize that no matter how they perform, they will have full support from Taiwan. For example, Taiwan has set up a local food station near the Olympic Village so our athletes can enjoy familiar food. Many sports fans have also bought tickets to Paris to watch the games, and there's been an outpouring of love and support on social media for our athletes.

When we learn more about a certain sport or athlete, we realize that the Olympics are just one stage in an athlete’s entire career. Sometimes, an athlete participates in the Olympics solely for the honor of Taiwan, so we shouldn't complain when they lose a game. Instead, to show our gratitude for their contribution, we should cheer for them unconditionally as well.

Furthermore, many organizations have put in a lot of effort to ensure we can watch the Olympic Games at home. If you haven’t yet, next time you can purchase a paid subscription on Hami Videos or Elta OTT online, allowing you to enjoy many different sports right from your computer or smart TV.