High Expectations

For the better part of my working life, I have been taught to create “challenging goals.”  That means to conceive of the end product as higher and better than that which an ordinary effort would produce.  Start at the end, and conceive of the end result, or the goal, as higher, bigger, more impactful, etc.  In other words, begin every work with a ‘challenging goal’ and a high expectation.  And, while I continue to believe in the usefulness of motivating goals for worldly success, I have, in recent years, begun to observe some negative effects on my spiritual walk.