Life is too short for running after hundreds of things but long enough to achieve five goals you decide upon.
Before I went into defining the goals, it was very important to get one thing straight: It is my life.
My goals have to be designed in a way that helps me live well, helps me accomplish things important to me and gives me a sense of awesomeness. What it also means is to stop comparing it with others, they have their own goals and lives. Surely some can be inspirations for me but also nothing more.
Secondly, the goals I define should be measurable. Why? As it will allow me to see when I have succeeded. Here it is very vital to understand the meaning of success for yourself. This might not be the same definition as what people and society around me preaches. It is something which will give me the notion of having achieved something which is meaningful to me, give me the feeling of being awesome.
goal noun
1 : the end toward which effort is directed : AIM
2 a : an area or object toward which players in various games attempt to advance a ball or puck and usually through or into which it must go to score points
b : the act or action of causing a ball or puck to go through or into such a goal
c : the score resulting from such an act
3 a : the terminal point of a race
b : an area to be reached safely in children’s games
Excerpts from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/goal
Once I had this cleared up, the task to define the goals. That’s the most difficult part. Doing so I could feel the clutter of numerous thoughts crossing my mind telling me to do this and do that. I often drifted away in my mind, focussing on tangential thoughts. Every time I had to keep reminding myself, “What are my goals for life?”. And not starting to think about what I have to do, we will come back to it later.
Once I had this answer. Things started clearing up in the mind. As I was doing a lot of things which were not contributing towards my goals. Moreover the things I needed to succeed were not going to happen overnight. So if I were to walk a path that would lead to this success, I needed to set some goals for me.
You surely have read about my rule of five where I wrote about my way of simplifying things. That is what I applied here. I interpreted by definition of success into a single goal which would reflect the success I was trying to achieve. Once that was on a piece of paper, I went ahead to think of what were the stepping stones to this goal. These I limited to two for medium-term and further two for the short-term. The idea is to work on the short-term goals.
I often hear successful people saying – “I live life by the day”, “I take life as is comes”. I thought that it does not sound right. For all I have been taught was to think ahead, plan for the rainy day, you need to have a plan and many more such pieces of wisdom.
What was I missing? I decided to take a step to the side, for a minute to reflect.
