Setting Goals and How You’re Doing it Wrong

Life should be governed not by desires to achieve goals that are immediate and contradictory, creating inner conflict and suspense, but by habits of living properly and enjoying themselves. In other words, achieving something always takes a thorough deal of planning.

Can you write down in one minute all of your goals for the next three years in all meaningful areas of your life?

I think only a small percentage of readers can do that. Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to achieve your goals that seem clear, close, and achievable? You often think you just have to make a systematic effort over a certain period of time to achieve the result. Why isn’t there enough motivation to realize what we seem to want most? Where does it go? Why is it even so hard to set goals and understand what we really want?

Why don’t people do the most important thing in their lives – they don’t set goals for themselves, even though success equals a goal, and we all want to be successful?

Nine Reasons Why

Not Taking It Seriously

Life never waits for anyone, in the whirlpool of events and things that happen, it is very difficult to stop and think about our place in it and whether we are really where we want to be. We don’t set goals for ourselves, because we don’t approach this question seriously. If you take a closer look, each of us already has a plan written out clearly: school, college, career, family, kids, apartment – well, give or take something else. This standard plan may even look good on the surface and can work for anyone, if you don’t consider the implications. But everyone is different, and everyone’s needs can’t be the same, either. The problem of not being serious can also be seen in many companies. If you look around, you can list a huge number of quite successful small companies that bring in a steady income. There are also many that barely make a living from one fiscal term to another. The key word is “barely”. Have you ever seen a single multimillion-dollar company that became one without an ambitious plan in its arsenal at the beginning? Sure, there is some chance, some luck, but isn’t luck the reward for fanatical faith and astounding persistence in the years-long course of action?

In fact, the origins of not taking oneself and one’s life seriously derive from the second reason:

Being Afraid to Take Responsibility

Being free implies the ability to make choices, and the right to decide always goes hand in hand with responsibility. If we follow the generally accepted standard of life, we can always justify ourselves by circumstances if we fail, in which case we avoid criticism from our milieu, because our actions fit completely into their worldview. In fact, it is not our failures that cause us the most pain and fear, but the condemnation from our society. This is the next reason why we don’t set goals for ourselves:

Fear of Criticism From Our Milieu

Any society needs rules and norms of behavior followed by its members in order to exist, otherwise chaos will consume it and spit out the bones. Thus, any individuals beginning their life journey have the opportunity to satisfy all the basic needs, following the standards already accepted in society – first of all, to satisfy the need for security. But the moment an individual overcomes the first two obstacles, they begin to take their life seriously and assume responsibility for it – they risk triggering the condemnation of his society, since his behavior is likely to be inconsistent with established standards that have become stereotypes. And at this point they must make a decision: do they manage their own life, fulfill their desires, achieve their goals and take responsibility for their failures, ready to accept condemnation and misunderstanding, or do they shift responsibility for their life onto society and are always under the protection of their preconceptions and beliefs. Accepting the first path, however, entails accepting the willingness to fight constantly. And this is where the next problem arises:

The Problem of Accepting Determination

When a person begins to consciously approach their life, set their goals and achieve them, it causes changes in the environment. In addition, a redistribution of benefits is initiated: if someone got something, it often means that someone else didn’t. In addition, a person who is aware of the value of their time and their life is much more difficult to manage, since they do not drift with the current, but make conscious and balanced decisions that can be channeled only in one direction – improvement and development. Both of these factors threaten the very existence of the system, and any system has mechanisms for self-preservation. Since childhood, we are being fed rules of behavior and standards of life, and if we deviate from them, we will be punished or alienated. This is why we enter adolescence, and then adult life with a burden of society-imposed traumas, limitations and complexes.

Guilt, Low Self-Esteem and Being Gnawed on the Inside

Because of low self-esteem, lack of faith in ourselves, we often don’t just fail to approach and fulfill our desires – we are even afraid to voice them and turn them into concrete and achievable goals, being forevermore pursued by another inner demon known as…

Fear of Failure

Fear of failure is present in absolutely any endeavor. Nobody can give a guarantee that the probability of occurrence of a certain event, even taking into account all factors, will equal 100%. There is always a fraction of chance, unforeseen circumstances and incorrect calculations. But, after all, in the implementation of absolutely any project there are obstacles and problems, because our world is built on the contradiction of interests, and all of them are also surmountable, otherwise the life of society and all processes would be simply impossible. Absolutely any problem has a solution, the only question is the resources that will be needed to implement this solution. The problem is that people don’t know the right means to achieve the goals.

Achieving Goals Is Not a Skill

You can trust those who achieved anything remarkable on this. No secret method, recipe, source or cause will magically transfigure the field of probability in your favor. It is only a fluid and flexible approach that can give you the tools to build up on previous victories, not some magic pill.

The Buridan’s Donkey as a Lethal Obstacle

The first seven problems are not too difficult to overcome, you just need the desire and some dedicated labor, but to understand themselves and their desires is much harder. The metaphorical donkey that this section title originates from, starved to death, after being presented two equal heaps of hay, being unable to decide which to eat. This is where the problem of values comes into light. All of the problems identified earlier, and especially the last one, are directly related to our values, which form our ideology, the concept of our inner self.

Values are being formed throughout our life, since our early childhood, under the influence of many external factors: culture and traditions of the country, rules of behavior in society, school, family and parental attitudes, literature, movies, and so on. The result is a big mess that can combine the most incompatible things. Very rarely do we consciously work to build our own system of values, which would help us develop and obtain mental harmony and balance.

In practice it turns out that it is the contradiction of our values or the presence of negative values that prevents us from setting and achieving goals and being happy.

So the first step to transforming your life is to examine yourself, to realize your values and to work on your attitudes. This is a difficult and time-consuming process, but without this work it is impossible to achieve inner equilibrium. Your values are the basis for the birth of your desires and goals.

If your goals are contradictory, you will never succeed, and you will spend all your time wondering what to do. And as you begin to move toward one goal, you will conflict with another.

The Flesh is Weak

Another reason why people do not set goals for themselves is laziness: a person is not used to work, and any achievement requires hard work. Each of us has a set of our own truths. Some of them we have inherited, some we have borrowed or discovered ourselves. What matters is not so much what those truths are or how we got them, but how we deal with them and how we use them. Our truths form the beliefs and values that govern our life activities and stimulate the right actions. How well they work for us is determined by the depth of our conviction and commitment to those truths. The set of these truths is called the “inner constitution”, and each of us is responsible for the set of truths we choose to live by.