One of those most basic self-development things is you set goals for yourself.
That’s like everybody says that.
Never registered for me.
It never felt right for me to be setting precise goals about what I was intending to do.
But now, looking back, I can’t really see a good reason for that.
It seems like I just wanted to go with the flow of life and see where life would take me.
And it seemed like setting goals was restricting me by sort of assuming I’m gonna do a certain thing instead of being open to the whole wide world of what life can be.
Even as I say these things, I mean, these ` do not sound very strong.
So I don’t know why I avoided it.
Some people say that people avoid goals because, when you have a defined goal, you now have failure conditions.
You now have if you don’t achieve it, you have failed.
Whereas if you don’t have defined goals, then you can technically never actually fail, because you never actually set any conditions for success for yourself.
So maybe that’s it.
Maybe I’ve been too passive in my approach to life.
I know that, in many ways, I have had more of that kind of contemplative, creative, philosophical kind of, you know, floating down the river of life, observing the universe kind of an outlook, versus the people that are just like charging like a bull towards your defined objectives.
That never felt quite right.
So these are my guesses to why I have simply never set defined goals.
Now, over the past year or two, my goals became- I did have defined goals in the sense of my personal management, gaining control, removing some bad habits, getting control of self-discipline.
That has been my biggest work of the last couple years.
But now, I have some basic good habits, I have some basic self-discipline, I have the ability to actually do something useful with my time and my energy.
So I have lots of ideas, but there’s something about putting a defined goal, writing out, defining in words – as awkward as it is to formulate into words – making a defined goal, specific goal, that this is what I want to do.
And so I’ve just started doing that this week, and already I can feel a sense of focus.
There’s something about setting goals that are specific that helps to become a focus for energy.
So my earlier phase was simply do anything that’s good.
Okay, you have time, spend your time and energy doing anything that’s good, rather than anything that’s bad.
And I think that can be a useful approach, too.
But now I think it’s time to get more specific, more focused on achieving actual things outside myself.
And so, one of my main goals now is to be able to do work that I consider to be meaningful.
And of course, that’s in the name of this project, and this project is that for me.
So, building this project into something that I can dedicate my full-time work into: that is now one of my my goals.
So there’s lifetime goals, and then a one-year goal: I now have a one-year goal for 2020 that I want to significantly help somebody with my work at some point in the year.
Somehow, through something I do, I want to significantly help somebody.
Simple goal, but there’s something about saying it.
Rather than having this kind of unformed idea inside, there’s something about saying it in actual words that helps to make it more real.
And now that I’m saying it publicly to the internet right now, it feels even more like I am declaring this.
So, I would be curious to hear from you: what are your goals? What are you working on? And there’s something about even answering that question that already gets things moving.