As I am appraoching the end of my graduate degree, I have been thinking more and more about what my next goal is going to be. Where do I want to go next in my life. Up to this point, a lot of goals I pursued were either set for me, or just naturally fell upon my path. Going from elementary school, to highschool, to university is such a natural path, I never really questioned it. But now I’ve come to the end of the path of formal education. What’s next?
To delve into this intelligently, I have been reading and investigating the topic of goal setting a lot over the past months. Many sources recommend setting long term goals. Imagining where you want to be in 5 or 10 years time, so you can start laying the foundations for that future right now. The idea sounds simple and logical, but I personally found it hard to formulate exactly where I want to be in that long of a time span. Recognizing this issue, other sources recommend focusing on short term goals only, and yet another proposes a hybrid approach, taking something from both schools of thought.
In this blog post I’ll discuss a number of ideas and approaches I found about goal setting, and my thoughts about them. I tried to structure them so the pieces flow over somewhat naturally, but it is more like a loose collection of thoughts than one cohesive story. So forgive me if it seems all over the place. Nevertheless, I think there will be ideas in this blog that can spark some thought and contemplation. If you’ve been struggling with the idea of goal setting as well, this might give you some insights.
Start early, plan for the long term.
You might remember being asked as a kid what you wanted to become later in life. Kids usually give entertaining answers to these questions. Boys want to become astronauts or firefighters, and girls want to become dancers or veterinarians. Although these questions are rather innocent, it reveals a common idea. Figure out early what you want, because the road to get there is long, and the earlier you can start on it, the better.
I remember having to decide halfway during highschool which courses I would like to keep, and which I would want to drop. This choice would 3 years later eventually determine which undergraduate degrees I could enroll in, which then also in turn determined the choice of graduate degrees. That one choice that I made when I was around the age of 15 cascaded all the way down to now. If you wanted to study medicine, or become an engineer, making the wrong choice early on could have made it very difficult.
The long-term goal approach generally builds on this premise. To avoid ending up somewhere you don’t want to be, or wasting a lot of time on roads that lead nowhere, figure out beforehand where you want to be in 5 to 10 years in the future. Then, think which steps you need to take in which order to get there, starting from where you are now.
Goal setting in this type of fashion has in fact shown to be beneficial. Jordan Peterson and colleagues designed a writing assignment requiring college students to clearly specify their goals 3-5 years down the road (find out more about the program here [link]). The result, as published in this academic paper [link], was most significant in the group of students that normally performed the worst. In this group, an increase of 44% in credit scores, and 54% of retention rate (the opposite of drop-out rate) compared to the control group was realized as a result of the assignment.
Perspective from “How Will You Measure Your Life”
In the book How Will You Measure Your Life, the author shares a few profound insights when it comes to goal-setting. He introduces two common mistakes when it comes to how we think about and deal with goals. The first one is the tendency of people to focus on goals that yield the most obvious, tangible, and fast results. Clayton (the author) writes:
“The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. This is often in their careers, as this domain of their life provides the most concrete evidence that they are moving forward.” (p. 72)
Clayton M. Christensen in “How Will You Measure Your Life”
Personally, I think this is not exclusive to high-achieving people, but it extends to everyone. The problem is that by focusing on the most tangible and immediate goals, we often neglect things that do not give tangible or immediate rewards, such as relationships. In the book, Clayton uses the example of raising children. Parents who spend little time with their child when it is young, because they think they can catch up later when the kids have grown up a little. But later they discover that it’s hard to build a good connection with their kids, and correct their behavior at that point.
I see the same thing happening with relationships in the modern era. This can be especially problematic for women with a child wish. Some think that they can spend their twenties partying and hopping from one partner to the other, or just focusing 100% on their career. When they reach early 30’s, they start thinking it might be time to find a suitable partner to have a family with. However, they never really took into consideration that it takes a long time and often quite some sacrifice to find a suitable partner, and build a meaningful and stable relationship that is ready for raising kids.
This illustrates the second issue Clayton points out, which is that we tend to think in investments and goals as sequential. He writes:
“One of the most common versions of this mistake that high-potential young professionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced. The logic is, for example, ‘I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn’t as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in things that adults are interested in, then I can lift my foot off my career accelerator. That’s when I’ll focus on my family.’” (p. 94)
Clayton M. Christensen in “How Will You Measure Your Life”
This is a trap many of us fall in to in some way or another. By (1) solely focusing on the tangible and immediate goals, and (2) only thinking in goals as sequential, we neglect those things that require long-term investment and growth, and the ones of which the rewards are not easily put in terms of numbers (such as relationships). This can put us in a situation later in life where we really need or want something, but can’t get it anymore because we never invested in it. As Clayton puts it:
“It’s like planting saplings when you decide you need more shade. It’s just not possible for those trees to grow large enough to create shade overnight. It takes years of patient nurturing to have any chance of the trees growing tall enough to provide it.” (p. 90)
Clayton M. Christensen in “How Will You Measure Your Life”
This underpins once again the importance of long-term goals, while pointing out two major pitfalls a lot of us tend to fall for.
A framework for meaning and happiness
We all know from personal experience that it feels good when you set a certain goal and you achieve it, or make significant progress towards it. When we have a certain need or aim, and go out to satisfy that, our brain releases some dopamine that will make us feel good. Because dopamine is addictive, and you’ll get it in particular when doing something that has very clear and tangible rewards, we tend to focus on the short-term, flashy goals, as mentioned before. In this section I want to discuss how we can look at goal-setting as a framework for happiness and meaning, and how we can use this dopamine reward system to our advantage.
“A framework is a particular set of rules, ideas, or beliefs which you use in order to deal with problems or to decide what to do.”
Collins Dictionary
I’d like to distinguish two types of frameworks. The first one is short term, and often arises from our base needs. For example: whenever we feel very hungry, our goal becomes to satisfy our need for food. Within this framework, the action of going out to find food and eat it is what will give us the dopamine hit and subsequent feeling of satisfaction and happiness. The defining characteristic of this framework is however that it dissolves as soon as the need is met and the dopamine has been released. Once your need for food has been satisfied, the goal is met, and the framework does not provide you any ideas anymore for achieving satisfaction or happiness. As a result, this type of framework is not very useful for consistent happiness and satisfaction, as it constantly brings up the question, what should I do next to achieve a feeling of satisfaction and happiness?
Unfortunately, many developments in modern society have provided us with a poor answer to this question. What next? Well, you could scroll through one of your favorite apps, most of which are designed specifically to trigger your dopamine release through various smart methods. You could eat more food, designed to hyperstimulate your brain and senses. You could consume your favorite type of entertainment. In other words, there are plenty of options to keep you chasing dopamine hits all day in the form of these short-term frameworks.
Now you could argue there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, if one is content living that kind of lifestyle then what is the issue? However, I think there is one flaw to this type of life. I’m talking about living a life that is focused (mostly) on chasing short-term hedonistic pleasures. This flaw becomes especially apparent when people that live this lifestyle encounter some form of misfortune in their life that temporarily causes all of their usual dopamine-rich distractions to be either unavailable or uninteresting.
The pandemic provided an unfortunate opportunity to observe this phenomenon in some people. The hardest hit has perhaps landed on people that got most of their life’s joy and pleasure out of going out to parties, bars, or other social events. As many countries went into lockdown, these types of social activities became unavailable. With their main source of joy gone, there was not much left to look forward to. Many people got seriously depressed. They started to think about their lifes, and felt as if it was almost meaningless. What am I living for? What is the point?
What’s lacking perhaps is a framework that provides a way to progress, a way to get joy, and that is stable for a long term. That’s not just temporary, and easily or quickly satisfied. Why? Because when things are not going your way, when you encounter bad luck, you’re not instantly asking yourself what’s the point. You know what you are doing it for, and you know what to focus on to get yourself back on track.
What’s lacking perhaps is a grand narrative. What’s the narrative of your life? Moving from the one short-term pleasure to the next, day in day out? Whenever we read a good book, or see a good movie or TV-series, it’s not a question what the point is of the characters, or what they are about to do. It’s usually clear, everyone has a purpose, everyone is fulfilling a role. What’s your role?
A long term goal can establish a point on the horizon that you can direct yourself towards no matter the situation. There are two benefits to setting a long term goal and setting up a framework for achieving progress and happiness around it.
The first one I already covered a bit. Having a long term goal sets up a stable framework in which you can measure progress and success, the things that will give you dopamine and thus a feeling of happiness and satisfaction in your life. This framework will still be there if things are hard. It might help you push through the bad times. You won’t immediately fall into a pit of nihilism, wondering what the point of your life is. You have a reason to stay positive and keep going, and a direction towards which you can point yourself when you manage to get things back together.
The second one is that seemingly small and meaningless tasks can become meaningful when operating in a large framework working towards a big goal. If you have no purpose in life, then you might think to yourself: why am I even getting out of bed? Or: why would I clean up my room? Eat healthy? Take care of my appearance? Some of these actions seem rather tedious and useless to a lot of people. However, these apparently tedious and useless things might become useful and meaningful when considering the framework you operate in working towards that long term goal.
Say for example you want to become a writer and publish a book some day. If you get out of bed, you’ll have more time to work on your writing besides your other activities. If you clean up your room, you will have less distractions when you are at your desk trying to perfect your craft. Eating healthy will be beneficial for your brain, giving you more clarity of thought for your work. It will also give you more energy so you can work longer. Taking care of your appearance will give you more confidence, and it will make you more approachable. Both will help you in your social life. Conversations with friends can often be great inspiration, and building up a network will benefit you when you finish your book.
Although these things in and of itself might not feel useful to you, and they might not give you any pleasure, they become meaningful in the framework of this long-term goal you are working towards. If you see them in that way, as building blocks towards something bigger, they can even give you satisfaction. This is why specifying a larger goal can have a positive effect on your life in many ways, and give you more things to feel happy about.
Man’s search for meaning
In the book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl describes in chilling detail his experiences of being a prisoner of Auschwitz during World War II. During his time there, he could observe many of his fellow prisoners die of hunger, sickness, torture, or suicide. But there were those that for some reason were able to keep themselves alive and push through the insane misery.
What distinguished those that were able to hold on to life from those that perished?
Throughout the book it becomes apparent that those who had given up on life, who had lost all hope, were often the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine, but more from a lack of hope and something to live for. This idea comes back many times in the book:
“The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.”
“Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”
Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning
It was Frankl’s observation that those who knew that there was something for them left to do in this world that were the most likely to survive. Frankl often points to the words of Nietzsche:
He who has a why to live, can bear almost any how.
Nietzsche
The humans that had a why to live for, were the ones that were best able to withstand the horrors of the camp. In this way, a purpose or goal literally saved lives. It’s unlikely that any of us will ever go through something even close to what these people went through. However, it goes to show how powerful a meaningful goal can be. Something of which you are truly convinced you need to do before you give up can carry you through some of the worst things life will throw at you. I’d like to give Frankl the final word here, because I couldn’t describe it better.
“Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, ‘homeostasis,’ i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning
The problem with specifying your goals
So I think by now I can safely say that having long-term goals has several benefits. But, personally I found that actually specifying them is not that easy. I mean, how can I set a realistic goal? What do I actually want? Won’t things change a lot in 5 or 10 years?
A common pitfall when specifying your goals so far in the future actually does relate to this last question. If you ask people whether they changed their taste, opinions, or values in the last 5 or 10 years, they usually admit to have made drastic changes. Personally, I am an entirely different person compared to 5 years ago. I changed almost in every way imaginable. Yet, when setting goals for 5 to 10 years in the future, we tend to assume that we will remain the same person throughout this span of time, with the same wishes, values, tastes and convictions. As if what we think we want in 5 years at this moment, is going to be exactly the same as when we will ask ourselves that same question in 3 or 4 years. This phenomenon is also known as the end-of-history illusion.
Know thyself.
A second issue we tend to face when setting goals for the future, is that we actually don’t know ourselves that well. Think about it. Do you really know what you want? I don’t know it about myself sometimes. It’s strange because you would think that since I am myself, how can I not know what I want. It’s like you need to have a conversation with yourself to figure out what you want, as if you are two people, not just one. I think often we also tend to adopt other people’s goals as ours, because it’s convenient and better than nothing. Yet, we later find out those goals actually don’t match with who we are. Somehow, this does not occur to us straight away, once again confirming that we really don’t know ourselves that well.
Fooling yourself with fuzzy goals.
There is also an incentive for people to keep their goals vague, or to not set any at all. Why? Because when you specify your goals, you also specify when you fail. The more specific your goal is, the more specific you know when you failed to meet it. If you keep it vague however, you can fool yourself to say you reached it.
Quick example: Imagine having to do a test. A fuzzy goal would be: obtain a good score. A precise goal would be: score at least 80%. You made the test and got the result, it’s 65%. The person with the fuzzy goal can easily tell itself this is a ‘good’ score. I mean, it’s not bad right? What a good score is has never been specified here, and therefore can be made into the thing we want it to be.
Most people are extremely failure avoidant, and no wonder. It sucks to fail at something. However, this can also stop us from setting proper goals that will challenge us, push our boundaries. This failure avoidance very often results in people setting the bar very low or keeping their goals vague, just so they can avoid the possibility of failure. But I think this kind of behavior will prevent you from moving forward in a meaningful way, and keep you from realizing your full potential.
So we shouldn’t fool ourselves by setting vague goals, yet it is also difficult to set specific long-term goals since we don’t know ourselves that well, and even we did, we will likely change our ideas about what we want in the future.
Perhaps a way to deal with both these issues would be that we set a big but rather vague goal in the far future, and then translate that into more tangible specific goals in the near future. That way you avoid falling into the trap of setting only vague goals, and simultaneously evade the issue of being specific about things so far in the future.
In the next sections, I’ll talk about some goal-setting strategies that I found that aim to tackle the issue of specifying our goals.
Balance a deliberate plan with emerging opportunities.
One approach to goal-setting that tries to find a balance between long-term goal setting and the uncertainty of daily life also comes from the book How Will You Measure Your Life. In the book, the author discusses the importance of trying to find a balance between following a deliberate strategy or an emergent strategy. He writes:
I’m always struck by how many of my students and the other young people I’ve worked with think they’re supposed to have their careers planned out, step by step, for the next five years.
High-achievers, and aspiring high-achievers, too often put pressure on themselves to do exactly this. Starting as early as high school, they think that to be successful they need to have a concrete vision of exactly what it is they want to do with their lives.
Underlying this belief is the implicit assumption that they should risk deviating from their vision only if things go horribly wrong.
But having such a focused plan really only makes sense in certain circumstances.
In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge. Each approach is vying for our minds and our hearts, making its best case to become our actual strategy. Neither is inherently better or worse; rather, which you should choose depends on where you are on the journey.
Clayton M. Christenssen in ‘How Will You Measure Your Life’
Next, the book illustrates this point with an example from recent history.
When Honda made an attempt to enter the American market for motorcycles, their initial plan was to introduce their large, high-end motorcycle to the market. This made them a competitor to Harley Davidson, an established and very popular brand in the United States. However, this plan didn’t work out so well. The Honda bike was facing quite some issues, and they simply couldn’t match the competition.
Honda was struggling. It was around that time when one of the Honda employees took the small Honda Super Cub bike into the hills around Los Angeles to relieve stress. Honda wasn’t selling the Super Cub model at that moment, since they were convinced the US market would be interested in a large, high-end bike. However, the Super Cub turned out to be perfect for short rides through mountainous and off-road areas. Soon, people started to ask where they could buy such a bike. The Super Cub was also a lot cheaper than its large counterparts. Its popularity grew so steadily, that Honda eventually dropped its original plan, and started to sell and market the Honda Super Cub, with big success.
This story illustrates how an effective strategy should be a trade-off between a deliberate plan and emerging opportunities. Which one is the proper course of action depends on the circumstances. If you have a direction, and things are going well for you, a deliberate plan makes sense. On the other hand, if you have no direction, or if your original plan is not working out that well, it might make more sense to take advantage of any emerging opportunities.
Tiger Woods versus Roger Federer
In the first chapter of the book Range by David Epstein, the author makes a comparison between two very successful athletes. Tiger Woods is perhaps the most famous golf player of all time. He started playing golf from a very young age (age 3), and his father took it upon himself to coach his son to become the best player in the world. Golf is all Tiger knew from a young age.
Roger Federer, one of the best tennis players of all time, had a very different upbringing. He liked playing tennis, but he played many different sports as well. He dabbled in many different sports before finally choosing to go all-in on tennis. His parents didn’t push him to pursue any sport in particular.
You might have heard about the 10,000 hour rule. A popular idea that states that you need about 10,000 hours of practice into a specific skill or field to become an expert in it. Many people nowadays believe that in order to become good at something you need to start early and focus all your time into one craft, like Tiger Woods did.
In Range, the author tries to bring some nuance to this idea. Although practice does of course make one better in a certain field, the idea that you need to focus on something from a very early age or else you will fall behind and never catch up, seems to be off.
The domains in which the ‘Tiger’ type of upbringing is especially effective is in domains that can be classified as ‘kind’ domains, a term coined by the psychologist Robin Hogarth.
Kind learning environments: Situations in which patterns repeat over and over and feedback is immediate and highly accurate. Certain sports, music and games feature kind environments (like golf and chess).
However, most learning environments that we encounter in life are not ‘kind’ learning environments, but ‘wicked’ learning environments.
Wicked learning environments: “The rules of the game are unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns, and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.”
The author shows in the book through a number of examples that to excel in ‘wicked’ learning environments, it is often advantageous to have experience and knowledge in wide variety of fields, so you can draw from many ideas to solve problems. It will also allow you to see patterns and general abstract rules that hold in multiple fields of knowledge.
Why is this important for goal-setting? It tells me that although it can have its benefits to specialize and pick a goal early, it’s not necessary for success. Instead, one can start out doing a broad range of things, like Federer, and specialize later. In fact there is a study that showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that late specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities [study].
The quest for match quality
The reason that late specializers catch up with those that specialize early, is that they took the time to find a job that had a better match quality. As a result, they were more effective in that job and were able to progress faster, in effect catching up. Match quality is a term used by economists that describes the degree of fit between a person’s abilities and interests and their work. This turns out to be a key factor in one’s performance and sense of fulfillment in a job.
Experimentation, and trying a lot of different things, often feels like wasted time. Especially if some of your peers seem to get ahead of you as they stuck to the profession they chose from the start. But in fact, it can be an effective strategy that will lead to long-term success and satisfaction. Because as you are experimenting, you’re attempting to maximize your match quality. The higher this match quality is, the higher your growth rate and job satisfaction will be in that job. So the time invested in experimentation is not wasted, but an investment for long-term success.
According to Epstein, the author of Range, one of the issues of today is that people mistakenly think they can find their best fit right from the start. The usual attempt to do this involves a lot of time and effort spent on introspection, taking personality quizzes, consulting a lot of people, and other mindful activities. In actuality however, our insight ourselves is limited, as mentioned earlier in this blog. It is through taking action and the data we gather by doing, that we tend to learn the most about ourselves.
The finding-the-best-fit-from-the-start approach would be similar to a researcher trying to formulate the perfect hypothesis up front, basically guessing the right answer to his research question from the start. Although it can be useful to carefully examine and predict the possible answer to the research question up front, it is only through doing actual experiments and simulations, gathering data, that the researcher can really find an answer to his question. Experimenting, gathering data, and analyzing this data is essential.
Prototyping
This idea of experimentation also makes an appearance in the book Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. In this book specifically, the authors refer to it as prototyping. In the design world, a prototype is a first version of a new product, often having only the simplest design and features. It is created for testing. To see what still needs improvement or changing, and to get a feeling for the final product. The authors recommend to use this kind of prototyping in our life as well. Why? Well, the following scenario is a common example of what could happen if you don’t.
Elise had worked most of her life in Human Resources, and wanted a change. She had always been in love with Italy, and especially Italian cuisine. She knew exactly what she wanted to do after leaving her job. To open an Italian deli and café, so she could share her love of Italian delicacies. A passage from the book:
“She had saved enough to get started, collected all the recipes she needed, researched the best place near her home to locate such a business, and did it. She rented a place, totally renovated it, stocked it with the best products, and opened to great fanfare. It was an immense amount of work, and it was a roaring success. Everyone loved it. She was busier than ever. And in no time she was miserable.”
Designing Your Life
Elise loved the idea of an Italian deli and café. It would be a place she’d love to visit and be at. But she did not like running the business, taking care of the inventory, managing and hiring staff, maintenance, etc.
Such a scenario could possibly be prevented by prototyping. Imagine for example that Elise would’ve talked to café owners to find out what a typical workday looks like for them. She could’ve taken up a part-time job in a similar establishment to get a feeling of the work. Experimenting or prototyping in that way would probably have given her a hunch that what she was about to do might not be the best fit after all. This is a technique we can use to our advantage as well. You might have this dream in your mind, and if you do great, but how can you prototype it to verify if this will really make you happy?
Goal anxiety
Did all of this information about goal-setting make you slightly dizzy? I don’t blame you. I would like to touch briefly upon goal anxiety.
Goal-setting can be a rather anxious endeavor. Some people are anxious because they have no goal. Others are anxious to set one, because they are afraid they might not be able to live up to it. I’d like to mention a few strategies which you can use to battle these types of anxiety.
For the ones that are afraid they won’t live up to their goal.
- Measure yourself against your former self, not your future self. We often look at the gap between where we are now and where we want to be. For some this can lead to frustration, fear, anxiety and other negative feelings. Sometimes this gap can seem so large people will even give up because they think it’s just going to be impossible to reach the goal. I’d like to encourage you to look to the gap between your former self and your current self instead. The progress you made. Are you moving in the right direction? That’s what’s important.
- Divide large goals into small goals. Some goals are just so huge, that they are rather intimidating rather than inspiring. A common technique to deal with this is to divide it up into smaller goals until you reached a goal with a size that seems manageable to you. To be able to do 100 push-ups, you must first be able to do 1. Then 5, 10, 20, and 50.
- Appreciate the journey. People are often not satisfied for very long when reaching a goal. I’ve seen this most clearly in gamers. They will for example play hours upon hours on their Nintendo to find a certain rare Pokémon. When they finally find it, they are ecstatic. But by the next week, they moved on. They stopped playing the game entirely, and they are on to their next obsession. It’s quite often the same when it comes to more practical real-life goals. Therefore, try to not focus all your attention on the goal alone and denying yourself any pleasure until you reach it. Enjoy the journey, because that’s where you will spend most of your time, and that’s okay.
- Aiming high can reveal a path. A number of years ago, a couple of researchers conducted an experiment at Harvard. In this experiment, a participant watched a video of a number of players dressed in either black or white, which where passing basketballs to each other. The participant was supposed to count the number of passes of the white team. In the middle of the video, someone dressed in a gorilla suit walks across the playing field. As it turns out, 50% of people don’t see the gorilla. What does this reveal? What we see and don’t see is for a large part determined on what our aim is. So aim high, and you’re more likely to see opportunities that will lead to your goal. [source]
For the ones that do not have a goal.
Before reading my ideas, let me first say this. Everybody has goals. You already have goals as well. Anything you do is working towards a goal. Take what you eat as an example. You might not think consciously at all about what you eat, maybe you’re simply eating what you feel like eating. Still, what you are eating will affect your body just as much as someone who is very deliberate about what he eats. The end goal, the result of your eating habits, is your bodyweight and composition.
So it comes down this. Everyone is working towards goals. But some just picked their goals and choose their own direction and destination, while others are kind of sleep walking towards a destination they are themselves not fully aware of.
- Aiming at something is better than shooting randomly. If you don’t know what you should be doing, aim at something. Just pick something. Why is this a good idea? Two reasons. Number one: with a goal in place you create that framework with a reward system that will make you happy whenever you move closer to a goal. Number two: by going in a certain direction you can gather data, insight, that might help you set a more meaningful goal in the future.
- Fix what’s broken. Work on that which bothers you. A simple method to find a goal is to simply look around you. Is there anything in your life broken, that needs fixing? Fixing broken things in your life is never a bad pursuit. If you feel things are quite well already in your life, then think about this. What bothers you specifically? Often, we are bothered by things that others don’t really care much about. There is something about our character that makes us be bothered specifically by that thing. Perhaps, that just means you are the person that should go and do something about that specific thing. Go out, and solve the issues that you feel particularly bothered by.
- Experiment, experiment, experiment. A lack of goals also often means there’s just not a lot you are feeling passionate about. If that’s the case, your goals is to find something that you are passionate about. Obviously, that is something you aren’t familiar with yet. Until you found this thing, go out and experiment. Try lots of things. Try new sports, try to learn a new skill, some form of art, buy some online courses, travel, cook, attend events, join clubs, try a new job, start an internship, be a volunteer. I can almost guarantee that if you found something you really enjoy, a goal will naturally follow.
- Set obvious goals. You might not know what kind of job you’d like to have, or whether you want kids later. But there are things that will be beneficial for you no matter what you choose to do later. Some examples I can think of are: Being in good physical health (healthy weight, doing exercise, eating healthy), knowing how to drive (car/motorcycle/bicycle), being financially stable (having some savings, being debt free, having reliable sources of income), knowing how to keep a household running (cooking, washing, cleaning, basic repairs), having a good circle of friends, being mentally in a good spot. Lacking in any of these areas? These are some of the basic ingredients for a happy and fulfilling life, work on those.
- Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.
- As a special someone once told me. Life is more exciting when you don’t have everything planned out. It leaves more room for the unexpected. Although I think goal-setting is important, I think this is a positive way to look at your situation if you have none at the moment.
Set goals for things in your control
A final recommendation when it comes to goal-setting in general is this: When setting a goal, choose something that is within your control. Let me give an example. Imagine that you have a YouTube channel. A poor idea for a goal would be the number of subscribers after a period of time. Why? Because whether or not you will reach that is for a substantial part outside of your control. If you set this as a goal, you are linking your happiness to something that is out of your control. Not a good idea. A better goal would be, I will upload two videos each week for six months. This goal is almost completely within your own control, and can therefore hardly be spoiled by outside circumstances. Your success or failure is in this case completely in your hands.
Focus on systems, and let the goal be a natural consequence.
In Atomic Habits, the author James Clear points out that goals on their own have some inherent flaws. The following three are worth noting in particular:
- Winners and losers have the same goal. Think about it. There are a lot of people out there with big goals, but few actually accomplish them. So the goal in itself is not what makes the difference.
- Achieving a goal is often temporary. Say your goal is to clean up your room. You put in a lot of effort once, and when it’s cleaned, your goal has been accomplished. But if you don’t change your behavior, next month, your room will be dirty again.
- Goals can cause a yo-yo effect. A commonly occurring example is dieting. The average person that goes on a diet has a goal weight, achieves that weight through dieting, then stops, and gains back all the weight in a few weeks or months. This cycle often repeats a few times.
So what can we do to overcome these weaknesses. How can we set a goal and actually accomplish it? How can we achieve a goal, and then maintain that goal, or even build on top of it? The answer is systems.
Instead of focusing on achieving the goal as fast as possible, focus on building systems. Take for example the dirty room. Instead of putting in a massive effort one time to clean your room, and find it to be dirty again a week later, think of what systems you can put in place to have a clean room at all times. You could rearrange your room in a way that makes it easy to clean. You could install proper storage space for everything so you don’t have all of these items laying around everywhere. You could set a few simple rules, for example no shoes on in your room, an empty desk by the end of the day, wiping the desk every Sunday evening.
These simple changes in the environment and your behavior will result in the end goal: a clean room. But not only that. It will result in a clean room at all times from now on. You created a stable and sustainable system that has your desired goal as a natural outcome.
What distinguishes the winners from losers, is that the winners create a stable and sustainable system that naturally results in them reaching their goal. Losers on the other hand do not focus on systems but on bursts of effort, often making some progress for a while, but then slacking and falling back.
A final word
You have reached the end of my thought collection on this subject. If you’re still here, I applaud you. Thank you for your time. I hope you found something useful in my writings.
What will I do personally regarding goals? I think the benefits of long term goals are powerful. I will set long term goals, knowing and accepting that I might change my direction later. Meanwhile, I will focus on developing those skills and traits that will be helpful in almost any situation. They will not just take me closer to my long term goal, but also allow me to recognize and seize emerging opportunities if they present themselves.
I will focus on developing systems that will lead to success, fix the things that seem broken to me, and continue experimenting to increase match quality. What will you do? Let me know!
Credits
Ideas presented in this text were inspired by Jordan Peterson, Clayton Christensen, David Epstein, Ali Abdaal, Viktor Frankl and others. If you recognize something here you think you read or heard before, it might be from them. I simply consume a lot of content and try to bring thoughts together and formulate them in a way that seems clear to me.
Title picture credit: https://pixels.com/featured/samurai-archer-1878-daniel-hagerman.html