Pearls: They keep moving the goalpost

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

The expression ‘They keep moving the goalpost’ is one that I find myself using – in one variation or another – at least once a week these days.

The goalposts, of course, are the standards or measurements by which the rules and boundaries are established in our lives. Moving these goalposts, therefore, means changing the rules of the game partway through it.

It’s frustrating when you finally begin to win in the game of life, but then the rules seem to change. You get your raise at work only to find that prices have risen enough to overshadow it. You pay off your car, and then the next month you end up needing to buy a different one.

As an educator, I have witnessed the rules and standards changing over the years – and it seems like just when you figure out the system, somebody overhauls it and replaces it with something complicated and unfamiliar. I will refrain from descending into a deeper discussion on education, for obvious career and practical reasons.

Suffice it to say that life has rules, and that I have a distaste for rules being changed once I have skin in the game.

From my positive experiences in education – and the vast majority of my hours spent in schools have been just that: positive – I have witnessed the amazing progress we can make with students when we put clear objectives (challenging, yet reachable goals) into place, then holding fast to our commitment toward helping kids meet these objective goals.

Once a child succeeds at a task on one level, I can take him or her to the next field, point to a slightly higher, notably narrower goalpost and work on the next success. But if I had switched goalposts on that first field, all I could have hoped to accomplish would have been to discourage the student. That’s never the aim.

Now, I know most of you reading are not kids. Most of you have learned, however, that it’s nearly impossible to complete quality work for someone who changes the project midway through the construction, or who shows up with a different standard of quality in mind every day.

And, in turn, most of us have felt the satisfaction of hitting a goal in our professional lives, and we have also experienced the feeling of being entrusted with more responsibility – a higher, narrower goalpost – when we have mastered play on the previous field. It’s a good feeling when the boss gives you a more important task to finish: it’s a sign that you’re a trusted, capable member of your professional team.

In light of all of this, I can’t help but think that folks in leadership roles need to find that sweet spot, that perfect balance between keeping work manageable and making work meaningful. I can tell you that the educator’s role in maintaining such a balance is tough: you want kids to succeed when they try, but you also need to ratchet up the measures of success each day, to keep them learning and growing.

So I checked my step counter on my phone a while ago, and I was about 4,000 steps into my target of 10,000 I want to take each day – my goalpost, if you will, because several years ago I read 10,000 steps is the optimum amount.

But then researchers moved that goalpost for me, with the prevalent opinion now seeming to favor anything above 7,000 steps, and the understanding now being that the health increase we experience between 7,000 and 10,000 steps is negligible. This time they lowered the goalposts, right when I started to hit the goal fairly consistently.

And that’s life. I guess 10,000 steps won’t hurt me (and evidently won’t help me all that much, either). Moving goalposts are a part of the human experience – seems we have to line up and kick the ball as far and straight as we can, I guess.

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.