The Pygmalion Effect dictates that the higher someone's expectations are toward you, the more you're likely to achieve because you're instilled with an incentive to meet those expectations; high expectations act as a sort of "self-fulfilling prophecy". By extension, setting high expectations for yourself would be the logical next step to ensure academic and personal success. Being unflinching in your own standards regarding the achievement of an ultimate goal even in the face of enormous exhaustion and strife by demonstrating "grit" (passion and perseverance) should very well be how you would achieve concrete goals set out for yourself, both long term and short term.

Unfortunately, this rigid thinking has a very distinctive pitfall; how can your younger self know definitively what would make you most successful and, more strikingly, happy in the long term? How can you know that receiving an acceptance letter from school A, B, or C would be best for your well being overall? How can you know right now that taking the more circuitous approach to solving given problem, that not receiving a highly sought after and esteemed promotion, that not being where you so believed you would might be the best thing for you when you heavily outlined every facet of where you were "dead set" on being in exactly 20 years. For every more straightforward path one could take toward success, there are an infinite number of diverting paths that might very well lead to something more fantastic than you could ever envision at this very moment.

Motivating yourself through very specific goals and visions focused entirely on where you thought you would be and what specific accolades you "should have" attained can ultimately be deleterious in the realization of your full potential. Had Condoleezza Rice been entirely set on her initial career plans, the world would have had one more failed piano major and one less former United States Secretary of State.

In order to circumvent the pitfall of motivation through unyielding fixation on a very specific outcome, I advocate for an increased focus on a process instead of a destination. Setting high standards for oneself in terms of work ethic and pouring yourself into everything you do can only galvanize personal growth. However, even you're lead to a completely different line of work than you'd started in, immersing yourself in new passions you'd never envisioned before, I suggest not shying away or using your now obsolete standards to determine whether or not you'd failed.

After all, how could your younger self even begin to know the person you'll one day become?