I attended one of these workshops a few months ago, and I did so wearing my positive psychology hat. Those of us who are positive psychologists acknowledge "positive institutions" to be poorly understood, at least by us, so why not go to the source and learn something? If we want to understand how to do things well, it makes sense to study the excellent examples - individual people or institutions as the case may be.

And indeed I learned a great deal, and one lesson in particular has stuck with me. Obvious when stated explicitly, this lesson was never all that obvious until I heard it spelled out: Distinguish the ends from the means.

In Zingerman's parlance, the end is called one's vision, and the vision needs to be in place before the means to the end are considered, created, and enacted. The vision needs to be articulate and specific. And the action plan for realizing the vision needs to be realistic and vetted by those who know about the real world.

Well, duh. The distinction between ends and means is patently important. One need not attend a workshop or read this blog entry to appreciate this in the abstract. But the devil is always in the details, and one of the important details is to separate thinking about ends from thinking about means.

For many of us, when we set our goals and figure out how to achieve them, the ends and the means get all jumbled together. This jumbling occurs not only for the biggest goals in our lives, like the college we attend, the person we marry, or the career we pursue, but also for our smaller goals, like looking presentable for the day ahead, having a fun weekend, or - in my own case - writing a blog entry for Psychology Today that creates lots of hits but elicits no mean comments from readers (dream on, Chris).

As a research psychologist, my goal is to do studies that are important and interesting, that answer questions about weighty matters, and that suggest ways to enhance the psychological good life. This is a vision with which I am quite happy, although it is of course vague. When I start to flesh out the vision, the process too often gets mired down by my worries about the means. Pragmatic thoughts intrude. Where can I find research participants? How can I encourage them to participate? And most insidiously, where will I find the time to do all of this?

Mind you, questions like these eventually need to be answered, but trying to do so while I am establishing a specific vision about my research is handicapping. The resulting research plan is necessarily compromised, as is the research, as is my long-term satisfaction with my work.

I used to say with pride that one of my signature abilities was knowing how long it took me to do things, from preparing a lecture to washing my clothes to driving to the East Coast. Research suggests that most people most of the time woefully underestimate how long it takes to do even the things that they have done repeatedly. So, I have a useful skill. But after attending the Zingerman's workshop, I realized that this ability is simply a means skill and not an ends skill and that I inappropriately bring it to bear when thinking about my vision.

Do you remember that old - and cynical - definition of a cynic? Someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. In my own life, I know how long it takes to do most anything, but I don't always know what's worth doing, simply because I have not thought enough about my vision.

Most of you readers are not research psychologists, but I hope that the points I am making apply to whatever matters most to you. First figure out your vision in all of its life-well-lived glory. And only then consider how you might achieve it.

I am writing this blog entry at the start of the New Year, 2010. Like many of you, I usually start the New Year with resolutions that I write down January 1. Usually my resolutions jumble together ends and means, and sometimes they are simply about means.

At this very moment, I'm looking up at my bulletin board, on which is tacked my resolutions for 2007. (Maybe I should resolve to clean my bulletin board on a yearly basis!) One of my resolutions was to write a book. I like writing, and I usually write effortlessly. I've written books before. So that seemed like a pretty good resolution.

But guess what? I didn't write a book in 2007 (or 2008 or 2009). How could I have done so? My resolution was about a means to an end, and the end was thoroughly unspecified.

My resolution for 2010 was not to jot down "resolutions" off the top of my head on the first day of the year. It was to establish a vision, for my work and for my life, and maybe that will take the entire year or longer. That's okay.

In the meantime, I'm heading off to Zingerman's for a really good lunch with a friend.