For decades, the over riding three-act structure default in Hollywood movies has followed a pattern of ‘ Set up, Conflict and Resolution ‘, where the resolution is left completely to the seemingly Herculean abilities of the hero | heroine to resolve, overcome, destroy, make good, vanquish, discover, progress, unearth, overcome, accomplish etc as the situation warrants.
A lot of us suffer from what we call the ‘ Hero Trap ‘- an over reliance on our ability to handle something that becomes infuriatingly urgent which could have easily been avoided had it not been the temptation of the short term hack.
A project gone sideways, the end of a rocky relationship, the loss of a crucial game etc all leads us to think about what happened at the last moment, which is where we miss the wood for the trees. Actually, what is overlooked is what happened in the beginning or the middle, where the patterns could have been picked up, where one could have distilled the signal from the noise, when you had a stronger chance to make things better.
As it is said, New Year resolutions never really work. Though habits and systems do, more often than not. Hacking on the short term is short changing yourselves. Spending time on avoiding that and investing it in solid practices and habits is probably the best work you can do this year and probably the rest of your lives.
That way, we avoid the H(ero)iccups!