The Flash Season 3: Achieving Goals
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Goal setting
15 min read
The article centers on the psychology of goals - how they're formed, pursued, and how they can go wrong. The Wikipedia article covers goal-setting theory, including Locke and Latham's research on specific vs. general goals and the relationship between difficulty and performance.
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Temporal paradox
13 min read
The article discusses Barry's time travel attempts to save his mother and the unintended consequences of changing the past. The grandfather paradox is the foundational thought experiment about the logical contradictions of altering past events.
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Consequentialism
15 min read
The article grapples with whether good intentions justify actions that cause harm - Barry's well-meaning goals creating negative consequences. Consequentialism is the ethical framework that judges actions by their outcomes rather than intentions.
We all have some kind of goal.
When we're a kid, these goals are chosen for us. Things like learning to talk and walk. Your parents have these goals for you and you're expected to achieve them. Once you have a handle on these things, you end up with other goals pretty quickly. You're expected to learn things like what to do and what not to do, such as learn to dress yourself without help and getting up on time. Although people can help you with these things, they are fundamentally your goals to achieve and other people expect you to achieve them. Eventually, you're brought other goals to achieve like going to school and learning about the world. Goals like this are harder to achieve but hopefully if you've learned to achieve the other ones you have enough knowledge to actually go through and do these in a way that helps you grow.
In doing this though, you learn that you're supposed to start achieving your own goals and having your own ideas about where you want to go in the world. You have to make decisions about much longer term, difficult goals you can have and being able to achieve them is not as for certain as some of the others. These earlier goals actually seem really simple by comparison. What you also learn is that other people have other goals, some of which might cause problems for you in getting what you want for yourself. This conflict can cause a lot of problems and make people do some crazy things in order to find a way to get there.
Previously in this space we looked at the beginning of a journey and all the important parts of the starting. Then we looked at how it can be important to push yourself harder. To not get lazy about your knowledge of things so that you can do more than what other people have figured out before. Push yourself beyond your limits and how that can give you all new insights into the world and the potential you have. This isn't the end of the story though. Because of course one of the best ways to come to push yourself and not get lazy, is to have goals. Knowing where you're going is an important part of the journey. Making sure that you don't just aimlessly wander off
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