Morphologic

Having been in the workforce for over thirty years, it may be surprising that I still struggle with setting goals. In fact, I have been reading, making notes, and thinking very long and hard about this over the last year or so. Jim Rohn was a success coach and provided many quotable quotes, and my favorite tells how to set goals: “Decide what you want; write it down.”

It’s a simple plan, and yet… I still struggle. Last week I actually wrote this note to myself: Make imperfect goals. Part of my struggle is trying to get it right on the first try. I have to conciously permit myself to maybe–gulp–get it wrong. Believe it or not, that’s even hard for me to type! And I haven’t written any imperfect goals since I gave myself that assignment.

It’s also not such a simple plan, as it turns out. What do I want? I want to relax all day and get strong and fit. I want to get rich by reading a book on getting rich. It’s pretty easy to write a ridiculous goal. But “Get strong and fit by exercising daily” seems a bit like a page from the journal of Captain Obvious. In this pursuit, in any case, I have set myself a goal to write a blog post each week for a year (we’ll see what happens after that), and I’ve only missed one week since I started on August 6.

Speaking of this blog post, today’s word can be a challenge because it has a pretty easy definition, but is used in some painfully technical sentences. Morphologic simply means “relating to the form and structure of plants, animals, words, rocks, etc” (my personal dictionary definition–you’ll only find it here).

Identifying morphologic similarities and differences is key to many studies. We separate creatures in Biology this way; for example, new world monkeys and old world monkeys may both have tails, but only new world monkeys can use them to hold things. The periodic table of elements in Chemistry basically lines up the elements in order of how many protons they have, and then groups them by similar behavior. We gain language skills by learning parts of words and sentences and putting them together to express different thoughts.

We set goals to improve ourselves and the world, to achieve something worth greater effort than just coasting downhill. Although, making the world a better place by coasting downhill in my recliner on wheels sounds like my kind of goal. Especially if I could get rich at the same time.