Let me explain what I mean by intimidating, because I’m not talking about work-load. The work involved in mapping a current reality is much more intimidating—-in terms of load—-than daily journaling. But journaling—-which I’ve done: I have a box filled with written personal journals—-turned, for me, less into a faithful map of what I’d actually done and more into an effort to reconcile what had already happened to my goals. So if I had a hard day, I would try to recontextualize it, in my journal, in some positive light that showed how it ultimately contributed to my goals. And that became burdensome and painful ... hence intimidating to me as a concept now.

A current reality map, on the other hand, starts with the objective of forensic impartiality. I’m not doing it with any goal to validate my current approach. I’m just trying to actually see what is happening, with a bigger goal to see how what is happening is NOT aligned to what I want to have happen, so that I can innovate in a way that addresses that inconsistency.

And by framing it this way, it becomes more a process of innovation, which is less intimidating to me than the self-advocacy or self-defense or self-delusion I typically experience in journaling.