A Goal-Oriented Life: Consider Your Aim

If you don't know where you're going, you might not go anywhere

GaudiLab/Shutterstock

What are your goals for your life? Where do you see yourself in the next 10 years, or five years? A year from now, what do you hope to have accomplished? What are you trying to achieve today?

In other words: What are you aiming at?

Goals Require Courage

Goal-setting is something that people tend to think about at certain times of the year—New Year’s Eve, birthdays, or at the onset of a pivotal life event such as a graduation or wedding.

While goals are often talked about, according to an oft-quoted Harvard study, only 3 percent of people have written goals.

There may be many reasons for that. People are busy just trying to get through today; who has time to craft goals for the future?

Many people believe that their fate isn’t within their control anyway, so why bother setting goals?

Well-defined goals that are specific and measurable and attached to a timeline can also bring up a fear of failure. After all, if you never define what you’re aiming at, you’ll never fail to achieve it.

Still, others are so pessimistic about life that they find it difficult to muster the hope required to come up with a goal worth striving for.

The thing about goals is that even those that are never achieved can provide value and meaning to one’s life. You probably wouldn’t set out on a road trip without a destination in mind, but even if you take a detour along the way or stumble upon a better destination than the one you had in mind, it was the path you laid out that led you there.

When a goal is set, it defines an improvement or ideal to aim at. As one begins taking steps toward a goal, mistakes will be made, lessons will be learned, and new opportunities may present themselves—any of which may lead to the alteration of the goal itself. However, it was the effort directed at a particular aim that led to growth and development.

Most people tend to have a vague sense of the goals they wish to aim for. Perhaps they wish to improve their fitness or their financial situation; they hope for a career change or to find a spouse and start a family; they dream of starting a business or developing a particular talent; they want to move to a different home or geographical location; they may wish to improve their character or develop themselves spiritually.

A vague goal is better than no goal—at least there’s a vision, albeit fuzzy. A specific, written goal, though, can set you on an adventure.

Define Your Objective

To set a new goal, you must define what you’re aiming at. Clarity will give you momentum.

Write down a specific result you hope to achieve. For example, rather than saying you want to become debt-free, calculate your debt and declare on paper that you want to pay off this specific amount of debt by this specific date. You could go further by defining milestone goals along the way to measure whether you’re on track.

Brainstorm

Once you know what you’re aiming at, you can then begin brainstorming all the ways you can go about achieving your goal.

Using the example above, take time to consider the different paths you could take to pay off your debt. You may start by simply increasing your payments by a certain amount each month, cutting back on other expenses until the debt is paid. As you think further, you may realize that more frequent payments would reduce your overall interest in the debt, so that’s a strategy to consider. Or, you may realize that you have some items you no longer need in your home, which you could sell to pay your debt down faster. You may even consider selling a large item, such as a car or home, to very aggressively relieve yourself of the debt. On the other hand, you may see a business opportunity that could help you achieve your goal.

When you clearly define a goal and then give yourself the time and space to think of all the ways it can be achieved, you may find yourself amazed by the many options and avenues that are laid out before you.

Schedule

Once you settle upon an action plan for achieving your goal, make sure to lay out those steps on a timeline. This may involve a daily or weekly habit you need to maintain, calendarized actions you need to take at certain times, or systematized actions that are automated in some way.

Consistency is key to achieving any goal, and setting up a schedule is the key to consistency.

Measure

As you move toward your goal, track your progress. The true joy in reaching for a goal is the recognition and celebration of progress. The actual moment of achievement may be only a brief moment, but the sense that you’re continuously improving your life in some way is a daily delight. In fact, progress in one area tends to inspire progress in others. The key to getting the most out of this journey is to track and measure progress.

In our example, you might check the balances on your debts monthly or bi-weekly and graph your progress over time.

Measuring progress, of course, will also show you when you get off track at any point and allow you to quickly correct course.

Rest

There’s truth to the idea that we aren’t really in control of our fate. As you work toward your specific aims, be sure to maintain an open heart and mind to the opportunities and lessons that life presents you along the way. Oftentimes, we set out along a path and encounter all manner of unforeseen challenges and opportunities. It’s through these that, if looked at from the proper perspective, we are tempered and improved, and we may even happen upon better aims to strive for.

Do your very best and leave the rest to fate. This takes the pressure off any idea that we are in control of or responsible for fully designing every outcome of our lives, and allows us to simply rest and do our best.