Juggling Success
I was taking a break from doing something more important today, so I picked up some oranges we had picked from the garden yesterday and started juggling with them. At first I was just having fun with it; it’s a great exercise of concentration, meditation and hand-eye co-ordination which I learnt while at circus school at the age of 6 (or thereabouts).
I started counting how long I was juggling for (I counted every time I released an orange). At first I was quite bad, totalling only about 20-30 each time. But then I started getting into the 40s and managed to get one set above 50. Suddenly I juggled a set into over 70 (probably just an inevitable outlier). But it got me thinking. I set myself a goal: I’m going to keep juggling until I get a set into 100.
I continued juggling for a while and started getting demotivated when I had trouble even getting a set over 50. I thought about giving up. Then I realised that this would be quite dangerous, what would that say about my ability to persevere and achieve goals (admittedly good goals should have a higher purpose - which this goal only attained by being an example for myself of how I could set and achieve goals, or not). So i started being creative. And AIESEC had taught me this: Never change your goals; change your strategy. I switched to a new set of oranges (I think the old set had become soft because I dropped them too often). This helped, I started getting 40s and 50s more consistently. But I again eventually became frustrated, after a time it seemed that I was going backwards. How could I achieve 100, when I had trouble braking 60 for a second time?
I switched oranges again. On this set I actually performed worse than on the previous, so I came up with a brilliant plan. I would test out different sets of oranges. I got some pen and paper and started recording 10 juggling sets for each set of oranges. I’m pretty sure that just tracking my performance increased it, but I have no data to back that up. What I do have is data to back up that I perform better with bigger oranges (the oranges were generally very small, so even the biggest were smaller than the size of my palm). I selected a set of the biggest oranges that were left and started juggling I got into 50s and 60s. Then one set broke 70 for only the second time in this entire event. I was now confident that I could break 100 soon. It would just take one more outlier. And indeed it came. My very next set became a freak outlier with 150 releases and catches!
Those who fail to achieve their goals are those that do not persevere. That give up in the face of defeat. To succeed you need to be innovative. Change your approach, be systematic. If you are confident that you can succeed, you will. As Barack Obama said: “If you’re walking down the right path, and you’re willing to keep on walking, eventually you’ll make progress.”
