Goals. Must have goals. Must SET goals. Must chase chase chase goals. MUST reach my goals. La la la la…
It is the foundation of most productivity and personal development worlds that you must set yourself goals to work to. Without these, how will you know if you are making progress or not? How will you motivate yourself? How will you choose which route to take if you don’t know what the destination is?
All very valid points. In fact damn it, points I have made myself in various guises and guesses. So what is my beef with them today? Well, the trouble with heading full steam towards a set of goals is that you are probably destined to failed.
Positive attitude etc etc etc, but I am right you know. I’m not talking day-to-day stuff – “today my goal is to walk the dog before Qunicy. Gosh, goal reached in record time…”. I’m talking the bigger hollistic goals. The “I wanna…” goals. Because the longer the journey is going to be, the surer you can be that the destination will change.
When I was 18 I wanted to be a Scientist. If you had asked me my goals for the next 20 years – what I would want to be when I am 30 – they would have been that I would have my doctorate, a good research post, and spend most of my spare time traveling the world mountaineering. In fact, by the time I actually was 30 I was an Investment Banker and Certified Accountant, happily married, and spending most of my free time playing with my 2 year old son. What a failure. Missed all those goals didn’t I…
You see goals are driven by what you know now, under the assumption that random stuff doesn’t happen. Which it does. With increasing frequency. Now I’m no saying we don’t need goals – we certainly do, for all the reasons mentioned above – but what we should judge ourselves on are principles.
Principles are overruling concepts, rather than specific tangible aims. Principles are things like “Wake up every day happy”, or “feel financially independent”. Principles are things you just know are there or not.
So think through the goals you have set yourself for your future, and dig into them a little. Dig past the materialistic elements, and the quantifiable achievements and pull out what will actually make you smile in 10 years time and say “well that turned out alright”.
