Why we need to focus on the prize

There seems to be much benefit of keeping our eyes on the long term prize (benefit) we are seeking so as to minimize the psychological impact of what we have to go through to reach it.

Keep your eyes on the prize!

That’s what Valeria Maltoni expands on in her interesting post ‘How Small Differences in Perception can have Potentially Major Consequences‘. Experiments show that by keeping focus on the longer term benefits we get much more consistency in practice and more effort put into it: “we came up with a strategy that we called, “Keep your eyes on the prize.” So this is not the slogan from an inspirational poster. It’s an actual directive for how to look around your environment. People that we trained in this strategy, we told them to focus their attention on the finish line, to avoid looking around, to imagine a spotlight was shining on that goal, and that everything around it was blurry and perhaps difficult to see”

So let’s focus on the prize to reach it more effectively and avoid falling down at the first difficult moment!