This time of year sometimes takes me back to my days of moonlighting in a hothouse — a multi-story gym so congested in January that it felt humid and warm enough to grow orchids and heirloom tomatoes.
Then, between 1991 and 2000, I taught just two weekly fitness classes in studios with a wall of skyline windows in back and a wall of mirrors in front at the downtown Minneapolis YMCA. And that is where I learned how to dial in the formula at work in every fit person: some combination of exercise-related intensity, frequency and duration.
Many new Y members walked into that place to carry out New Year’s resolutions. They hoped to trim inches and pounds or lower their blood pressure, resting heart rate and cholesterol level.
Whatever their workout, many did it with enough frequency, intensity and duration to look and feel better a year later — even if they had not met their goal yet.
Others usually disappeared by February for the usual reasons. It cost them too much time, effort and, perhaps, cash outlay in the absence of overnight success.
But there is another reason resolutions — particularly resolutions around longer-term goals — tank.
In her 318-page book, “The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age” (Riverhead), author Bina Venkataraman argues that individuals have never been more capable of measuring their momentum toward a goal.
In fitness endeavors, the smartwatches around our wrists and smartphones in our pockets give us instant feedback on personal metrics, such as steps walked and climbed, heart rate, sleep quality and more.
But optimizing information in fitness, business, politics, climate change and more to reach longer-term goals requires something else, according to Venkataraman. It requires gazing at the horizon of your life alone and with others and contemplating a distant future with more imagination — a pursuit she calls foresight.
Once, seafarers used a telescope as a tool to spot signs of danger and opportunity across the ocean. Now, individuals and society must focus using other tools to see across time for similar reasons, a notion she shared last fall during a “TED Talk” — an online presentation with the TED Conferences American media organization focused on “ideas worth spreading.”
Matthew Huston, who reviewed Venkataraman’s book for the Washington Post, noted that she believes that many live separated from the reality of who they could become individually and collectively — for better and for worse.
“We treat our future selves as strangers,” he wrote.
Of course, baby steps in the present count so much at the gym, the boardroom, the 12-step program recovery circle, etc. But goal getters frequently lift their eyes from that incremental work to stay connected with the bigger picture and on track despite delayed gratification, the author explains.
“Why do we require immediate inducements to act in our own long-term interest?” Venkataraman writes. “In part because we see distant rewards as benefiting someone else.”
She reminds readers that shortsightedness in forecasting goals comes not from a lack of ability, but due to an unwillingness to become a realist with imagination.
Consider a 25-year-old who views the distant future and manages to imagine himself or herself at 65. That person might be more likely then to invest in a related goal, such as saving money for retirement. That decision stems from understanding the reality of aging and imagining what retirement will look like with financial planning and without it.
Venkataraman, a former journalist and climate advisor to the Obama administration, offers various “telescopic tactics” to improve in forecasting around goals, such as using “if-then” language. For instance, if you decide to sell your internal combustion engine car — let’s say a second vehicle — to make do with one car, then you could afford a more environmentally friendly hybrid vehicle with better gas mileage.
Another Venkataraman tool taps imaginative empathy: “… [Write] a letter to yourself to open 50 years in the future, or to a child, or niece, or nephew, or godkid … and try to inhabit that future as you imagine it to clarify what the choices are in the present that can lead us to different kinds of outcomes. If you want to imagine a better future, and if you can dare to do that, what are the things that have to change in both your actions and society to make that happen?”
Happy New Year!
Pam Mellskog can be reached at p.mellskog@gmail.com or at 303-746-0942. For more posts and photos, please timescall.com/mommy-musings-blog.
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