When I first saw that the topic for this week’s SEP Blog Battle is “Motion is not Progress”, my mind immediately jumped back about 15 years to sophomore engineering classes at Rose-Hulman. Or at least I’m pretty sure that’s where we discussed the difference between speed and velocity. Speed just tells you how fast you are going, whereas velocity adds in information about what direction you are moving.
We’ve all had times where we has something vital to accomplish, set to work going full-steam ahead, and then when we came up for air realized that we weren’t nearly as far along as we had expected. I’m sure most of us even have times where we’ve found we are no closer than when we started. And the longer we worked before we realized this, the more time and effort has been wasted.
The key to fixing this is of course to make sure that you’re constantly aiming in the right direction. And since many things we deal with on a dail basis are often shifting targets, this means making course corrections as you go, not just aiming once and firing.
Of course before you can correct your course, you first have to know where you want to go. Do you know where you need to be aiming today?
