How to Walk Straight jordanmarsh6, October 25, 2021April 5, 2023 About three weeks ago, leaders from my church spoke in what we call General Conference. One of those leaders shared a story about research done many years ago at the Max Planck Institute testing how well people can walk in a straight line. I was so intrigued, that I looked up the study myself. The idea was pretty simple: give people a GPS tracking device, send them out in the forest, and tell them to walk as straight as they can. They found that when the sun or moon was visible, the subjects were able to walk in a straight line; however, when these anchor points disappeared, the subjects walked in circles as tight as 20 meters in diameter. Here is a picture of the subjects that they studied: The subjects RF, PS, and KS all walked on a cloudy day. You can very clearly tell that they were all over the place. The subject SM walked when the sun was visible, except for the first 15 minutes. I thought SM was particularly interesting because you can see that he/she started going in a northwest direction but then completely changes course by going a more Eastward direction; presumably once the sun came up. After that, SM was able to produce the straightest line the study observed. I’m sure you can imagine where my little metaphorical soul is taking this. Sometimes Ι feel like I am really making progress when in fact I am probably walking in circles. I may think I am exercising fairly well. I may think I am not spending as much time on social media. I may think that I am really making a difference for others. With no way to reliably measure my improvement, I tend to rely on my intuition. It seems true to me, in both our efforts to improve ourselves and our efforts to physically walk in a straight line, that our intuition is quite fallible. There are many guardrails, or anchors, that I have suggested on this blog to overcome our fallible intuition. We can meet regularly with others to review our progress on our goals/habits. We can keep track of streaks that give us an indication of how often we have performed a particular goal/habit; and by extension, we can refuse to let one broken streak completely erase the motivation to start another one. We can begin each new journey to perform a particular goal with an initiation ceremony; one that symbolically outlines the reasons why we want to do something and acts as a reminder of our resolve to do it when our motivation is low. These are just a few examples of things I feel will help us actually walk in a straight line. I have a sincere desire to metaphorically walk straight in my efforts to improve myself. Circling will only prolong the task. I think the ideas I have shared on this blog are helping me to understand what that will take. I hope you are finding the same thing I am! Self Improvement