Goals - long term vs short term rewards

 I guess it has started to be clear now that it's the goal which drives a person or else he or she may fall in the grip of the activities which gives him good feelings only or exactly pleasure seeking activities, and suprirsingly these activities don't have enough returns in a long term future. Now when I am at a decent age of my life, I can see how people craft themselves, how I have crafted myself in last decades and based on the material that has been added to my body and mind, a lot of the actions are performed sub-conciously.

Here one needs to be very alive on understanding which direction his ship is going because by now we have grown a very large amount of likings (small or big) doesn't matter. From having a likingness to eat cakes and chocolates when we see them to giving for a morning run, all of them comes under the same roof. Thus some likings might give us pleasure where as some might give you pain, but one has to rise above this body level feeling first and see from his intellect that which one gives what in a longer run. If we get up every day and go for a run in the morning, it surely hurts but if one keeps on doing that for a consistent amount of time, it actually helps him build his health in a very good way, but it will take time.

In the same way if we talk about something that is pleasurable ex eating a cake, if we keep on eating the same amount of cake everyday then it does have a diminishing return with respect to the pleasure it gives when one consumes it.

Yes this is what happens if one keep on taking the same amount of cake everyday, it will start getting less tasty after few days; thus the body will ask for more quantity to get the same amount of pleasure. All of this happening in a short term and that too on a body level.

Since we cannot see these graphs in our mind, because it will need to visualize every day's data of how much cake I had or how many days I went for run, that's the reason we cannot get inspired by the goal that needs a long term commitment into it. What we end up for is the short term pleasure (only for that day).

Now the question is how to focus the mind on that graph that builds up everyday instead of only today's quantity of good feeling!