Many of us embark on an adventure to enjoy the journey of achieving our goals.
It is important to have a goal in life. Setting goals helps a person define what is important.
Why is it good to set goals and what are they for?
Goals serve to set off on a journey of life where adventures await us that we can’t even imagine from the starting position.
Is the meaning in the journey or the destination?
That question is at the level of what came first, the chicken or the egg? I’ll leave that to someone else to answer.
I have a more important question for us in this context:
Why is it important to set goals?
In this wonderful life adventure, we seek meaning through a series of goals.
The meaning of everything we do.
It is healthy and necessary that we find meaning for ourselves in everything that life brings us.
Recently, while conducting an education in Sljeme (mountain peak in Zagreb), I asked the participants to set one goal that they want to achieve. It could be from any aspect of life, achievable within a year and the participants had no obligation to share it with others.
I was surprised when a few, otherwise very successful people, told me that they have no goal. Despite my insistence, they could not find a goal that was valid for them.
Is it possible that people of their profile do not have a goal? Is it possible that there is a single person who does not have a goal?
It is impossible not to have a goal.
I claim this responsibly and no matter how much some of the participants assured me that they don’t have one, with a little trust and patience it soon became clear that everyone has goals. The question is, why is it difficult for some of us to express our goals and where is the difference between dreams and goals?
About that a little later, let’s get back to the outcome.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
By engaging in “outdoor” activities, you can meet so many people who consciously or unconsciously participate, not for the reason of beating others, but to grow themselves and enjoy the journey.
In a few sports/recreational events we meet so many satisfied and fulfilled people motivated to push their limits and at the same time want to enjoy themselves along the way.
Every adventure, race or trip carries a journey and a goal.
Isn’t the same for life?
Hellen Keller wrote: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
Starting this journey from the goal, as logic dictates, it’s time to go to the outcome itself.
Progress in the broadest sense of the word is immanent to every human being. As long as we live, we want to outgrow ourselves. Autotranscend.
Self-improvement is the adventure of life. Many of us at some stages of life are just surviving life, not experiencing it. They live from day to day. Regardless of material and social status.
We are often asked to fulfill other people’s visions, starting from our earliest childhood.
I will take elementary school as an example. Being an excellent student is imperative for most children today. This is the vision of most parents under the slogan that it is preparation for life.
We, adults, seem to forget that “Man is born to live, not to prepare for life”, so the only vision of most parents of primary school children is excellent success in school at the expense of many other experiences.
This is where the giving up of one’s own goals and vision of life begins.
Many of us continue to live by fulfilling other people’s visions and goals, which is self-explanatory, but the absence of our own goals within the set ones is worrying.
It is our right and obligation to find the vision and goals of personal life within the given framework.
One of the possible conclusions is that it is good to set goals for a fulfilled and happy life, regardless of whether we actually achieve them all.
Do goals arise from our dreams or lack of those dreams?
Let’s explore a little how our goals are created.
We become aware of our dreams very early. Unfortunately, we believe adults very early on that we don’t need to dream, so we know many who have scattered their dreams, and thus the will to shape their lives.
My goal is to bring my dreams and the dreams of others to life and thereby awaken the unlimited power that lies dormant in each of us.
I was lucky enough to learn the power of dreams and goals back in 1983.
On a typical Sunday winter foggy morning, while the sun had not yet shown its intention to release its rays through the thick Zagreb fog, stepping out with a heavy step and blurry eyes from the bus on Žitnjak that I jumped into in Ivanja Reka after being a waiter at a wedding all night, I decided that my goal to finish university as best I know how and that I will do what truly fulfills me in my life.
At the time it seemed more like a dream than a goal.
But that morning, in which I was faced with a river of people who were just leaving or entering the nearby factories, was enough incentive to transform the daydream into a decision, and the decision into a goal.
Some time later, that decision and goal transformed into my coaching calling, which I still enjoy today.
In order to set a goal, we have to imagine/dream something and based on these ideas make a decision and define the goal.
In order to significantly increase the chance of achieving the goal, a firm decision is needed, after which we will devote ourselves to achieving it and at the same time exclude any other possibility.
It is good that we are aware that along the way we will surely make mistakes and sometimes go astray, but if the goal is meaningful enough, we have the right not to give up on it.
Decisions determine our destiny
Three decisions are crucial for each goal:
- a decision about what to focus our attention on
- a decision about what that goal and path mean to us
- a decision about what to do and what not to do to achieve a result (especially when we run into obstacles and want to give up)
The aforementioned decisions, as well as the goal-setting process itself, will prevent unconscious decision-making. Our mind has built a decision-making system and this unconscious system directs our thoughts, feelings, and actions. A prerequisite for well-set goals is making good decisions. One of the obstacles to not defining goals is the fear of making the wrong decisions, and not setting goals for fear of not achieving them. Since that foggy Sunday morning way back in 1983, I’ve been adaptable and viewed any failure as a learning process and feedback. Giving up was not an option. In many other situations, I would like to remember that commitment and success.
Many years later I learned that success is truly the result of a good decision, and that decision is the result of experience. The experience itself is often the result of a bad decision. Learning from your own mistakes is as necessary, as learning from other people’s legends.
Do you know what you call a man who learns from other people’s mistakes? Yeti! Everyone is talking about him, but no one has seen him! I met many successful people in my business, and they have in common that they made more wrong decisions than me and learned the best lessons from those decisions.
One of the best decisions is to take advantage of whatever life brings us at a given moment.
We are successful when:
- we decide which goal we are dedicated to
- we are ready to learn along the way
- we continuously adjust our approach using whatever life throws our way
- we often make decisions
- we enjoy making decisions
Let’s be aware that decisions more than circumstances determine our destiny.
