For the past five years, I have started every year by setting out goals for the year and have designed processes and systems that will help me get there. The root of all this has been the desire for making constant improvement, the desire to be better today than I was yesterday.

So, when I read this post by Mark Manson titled 'The disease of More' where he makes the point that a lot of people today pursue "more" in the sense of getting better at everything they are doing, which will then lead them to trading off on important things in pursuit of the next dopamine hit that comes with the incremental improvement in something.

While I don't completely agree with his line of reasoning, it did get me thinking about what was the underlying driver for my desire to be better today than I was yesterday.

The most coherent reason I could come up with was that it adds meaning to everything I do. It is the cornerstone of my identity that I can fall back on at any point in time in order to rediscover myself. And that, to me, is as good a reason as any.

Of course, I am probably biased (recency bias) in arriving at this as the reason because I've been spending a good deal of time thinking and writing in the recent weeks about what brings meaning and purpose to everything that we do.

Nevertheless, I still see this as a compelling enough reason to pursue continuous improvement as a goal in and of itself with no specific destination for where the improvement has to stop.

What's your reason?