The fine art of abandoning goals
Posted
May 23 2008, 09:57 AM
by
Karen Datko
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.
Hopefully, that headline woke you up a bit this morning.
Several months ago, I made a list of 101 goals that I wanted to reach in the next three years. I piled this list on top of an already long list of medium-term and long--term goals --including building a writing career and paying off debt.
While making the giant list of goals felt very empowering at first, it soon became a big weight on my shoulders. I was reaching for too many things at once. When I set a goal, I'm committed to achieving it, and thus I often feel like Lucy and Ethel on the chocolate candy assembly line -- more to do than I can possibly keep up with.
As I mentioned in my review of the excellent book "Happier," a key to making goals attainable is to figure out the ones that feel most vital to you and eliminate the rest. You're then able to focus a significant amount of your time and energy on each remaining goal, bringing them to fruition much sooner.
I sat down with my list of 101 goals and decided to pare it down to five. How could I do that, when I found value in all of them? Here are a few principles I used:
Ask myself serious questions about each goal. Does it really fulfill me? Do I find value in working toward it? Would I feel value in achieving the goal? Compared with other goals, does it offer significant value in my life? Using those questions, it became clear that, at the very least, a lot of the goals were simply not up to the standards I had set.
Realize that many goals overlap, and seek a goal that, when met, would automatically take care of other goals. Many of the goals that remained on my list had significant overlap, so I tried to select one goal -- or create a new one -- that contained what I was striving for with the other goals. This process eliminated many more of the goals on my list.
Evaluate the remaining goals in terms of how much joy and fulfillment they bring to my life. A good goal brings joy and fulfillment along the road to success and often a giant burst of joy when you reach it. They add genuine value to your life. I attempted to rank all of the goals by the value they would bring to me while doing them and from successful completion. Using this filter, the top five goals became clear.
Here are my goals for the next three years:
Build up my fitness so that I can do at least Rung 30 of the lifetime fitness ladder on a daily basis. Achieving this goal would provide thorough daily cardiovascular exercise. I can do this each morning when I first get up, down in the basement while the family is still asleep. This is a combination of several fitness goals on my earlier list.
Eliminate our family's debt, other than our mortgage, and build up a $50,000 investment portfolio. This means, day in and day out, practicing frugality and putting my money away. This is also a combination of several goals from the earlier list.
Read a challenging book every week. I'm reading well-written fiction and nonfiction. I consider collections of essays and short stories (The Best American Series) to be appropriate here, as well as Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and critically acclaimed nonfiction books.
Write a daily diary for my son and daughter, recounting something I did with them each day. This requires not only writing in the diary, but also doing something valuable and worth noting with them every single day.
Make writing a full-time endeavor. This encompasses a large number of goals from the earlier list, because to do this I need to continually raise the bar of excellence on The Simple Dollar, find new ways to use my writing to build income, and fully develop some other blogging ideas.
That's it. These are my five goals over the next three years. As long as I can keep moving forward on these goals, I will have accomplished virtually everything of value on my list of 101 goals.
This new list doesn't feel like pressure; it feels like a weight off my shoulders. I no longer have to look at that long list of goals and feel as though I'm failing because I'm not accomplishing them. Instead, I can look at just five and feel empowered. Five goals, all of which provide some pretty obvious next steps all the time, fill me with a sense of "let's get this done!" excitement rather than the sense of "that's just too much."
However, creating that longer list served a valuable purpose. It clearly identified my chief concerns: my family, my health, and my creative growth. From that came a more concise list of goals, and it would have been much harder to find good ones without the brainstorming of the longer original list.
Don't be afraid to abandon your goals when they begin to overwhelm you. Try to define goals that are in accordance with what you find valuable in your life, keep the number of goals low, and you'll find yourself with a lot more motivation to succeed without the weight of feeling overwhelmed with too many goals to achieve.
Other articles of interest at The Simple Dollar:
"101 goals in 1,001 days"
"More on 101 goals in 1,001 days: 101 money-saving list suggestions"
"How to define a tangible, reachable personal-finance goal"
