Goals

– You can have everything you want
(just not all at once)

(Series hiatus)

TLDR

Re-define realistic. Goals don’t need to be huge in the beginning. Be careful what you tell children about their dreams. Don’t delay gratification until you achieve your goals – enjoy the process, learn to not be attached to the result. Avoid telling yourself, “I’ll be happy when…” Don’t try to achieve all your goals at once. The Series posts are on hiatus.

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Introduction – choose your hard

If you’ve been following my journey you’ll know that in the past couple of years, my ambitions have grown. I’d been in the depths of depression for a long time and discovered that for me, personal growth / personal development is the way out. I now have both something to run from and something to run towards and succeeding in this takes discipline.

It’s hard to be disciplined, but it’s much harder not to. It never is or will be easy but I’ve chosen my hard. However, discipline is not enough by itself. Success also requires sequential goals and learning to love the process (passion). You can achieve everything you want, just not at the same time. This is the lesson I’m learning the hard way at the moment.

Goals

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having ambition and setting multiple huge, scary goals but I’ve realized four things about goals:

1. Incremental improvement is sometimes better than setting huge goals.

Sometimes small and simple is better. Little wins help you build confidence. You can always increase the challenge a little next time.

When I was crippled by mental health issues, it was more manageable to start small and build up step by step. E.g. get your room in order, then your health, mindset and routines with these steps repeating throughout my ongoing development. It’s a long process of incremental improvement rather than one big life change. There have been times when big changes have been necessary but these have been calculated in moments of clarity having built upon incremental improvement. Incremental improvement is much more sustainable and builds up like compound interest. You can always adjust the pace to suit your current needs and abilities.

Read James Clear’s Atomic Habits and talks and books from Jordan Peterson and Brian Tracy for more on this.

2. Realistic is relative – setting and achieving (un)realistic goals depends on your beliefs and potential ability.

Realistic is not necessarily a reflection of your overall ability or your abilities right now.

Once I’d found some stability as I climbed out of depression, I was able to start thinking more clearly and believing that a better life was possible. I began to dare to dream and I began to see how wonderful it can be to set outrageous goals based on those dreams, but it all started with the baby steps I mentioned earlier of starting small and building up until I had the self-confidence to believe they were possible to achieve. Read Brian Tracy’s The Power of Self-Confidence for more on this.

From a young age, the world tells you to be realistic. Many of these people don’t realise what they’re fully capable of and think they’re doing you a favour by telling you to be realistic as they don’t want you to fail. At worst some people may tell you this because they don’t want you to succeed and would prefer that you stay at their level.

Be careful what you tell children (and adults) about their dreams. As a boy, I was passionate about football (soccer) and would play every day no matter sun, rain or snow. I’d play for as long as the time I had available and for a while I wanted to be a professional footballer but many adults and other children in my life told me that I’d never be able to achieve this. As a result of hearing so often from people I looked up to that I’d never make it, I never tried.

I’m not saying had I tried to make it as a footballer I would have made it, but what would I have lost for trying? How far could I have gone? What could I have learnt? What fun could I have had during the process? Would I still be doing it now?

For me, realistic is more about being within your realm of passion. I’m talking about the thing(s) that excite you and align with your abilities. In the previous example, I was excited about playing football, I was good at it and wanted to become a professional but lacked the knowledge and guidance needed to foster this and see what was possible. Now, however, my goals are quite different and bigger and based on my current passions. I’ve also tied them to purpose and service as I believe these are some of the keys to living a fulfilling life, but it took time to get here.

When you set a huge goal based on your passion or dreams, you might feel that you don’t know how to achieve it right now but you’ll probably sense that if you commit and put in the work you can find or make a path to achieve it.

For this to happen you need to start with the end result and work backwards breaking it down to figure out the skills you need, who you need to become and the steps needed to achieve it. The exciting part of this is the challenge and the person you need to become to reach the goal.

If you don’t achieve the goal, analyse what you learnt from it. Identifying as a learner takes away feelings of attaching ‘failure’ to me as a person and helps me see the ‘failure’ as an opportunity to grow and become a better version of myself. After every ‘failure’ (challenge) I just (keep) try(ing) again or adjust course. The more wins I build, the more confidence I build and because of my passion, I keep pushing on with persistence and discipline to make it happen without being attached to the end result. It’s taken me a long time to get it but non-attachment to the result is the essence of enjoying the process and therefore your life.

3. Enjoyment of the process (non-attachment) is one of the keys to fulfilment.

Attaching your happiness, fulfilment or identity to end results (achieving goals) is a risky path.

Results are great but there are two outcomes if you do the above: either you achieve it, feel great for a short time and then need a bigger goal, or you don’t achieve it. Either way, you are always chasing happiness or fulfilment. It sounds something like, “I’ll be happy when…” Except when is short-lived or never comes. It took a lot of time and experience to realise this. It’s effectively taking delayed gratification too far. So the alternative is non-attachment or love of the process.

Earlier I talked about the importance of passion. Think about something you’d happily do every day even when it’s hard. When I was young this was football.

In contrast to football, I took up music lessons as a young child and this continued through to high school. There were parts of it that I enjoyed but I was never passionate about it so the practice was forced, I didn’t put my full effort into it and ultimately gave it up. With football, it was never forced – I did it every day because I loved it, but I lacked the knowledge, guidance and targeted training needed to improve to the level I needed to. Ultimately, I gave up football too when life and work got in the way.

Passion is the key to enjoying the process and building discipline. You’ll be amazed at how far it can take you, even when you don’t feel like it or things get hard. If you don’t know where to start, follow what interests you, see where it goes and dedicate some time every week to it.

My passions now are family, learning and writing, and I have huge goals related to these which involve big moves and financial costs, as well as a lot of study and career progression in order to acquire the skills I need to serve on the scale I plan to but I believe all of this is possible but it will take time.

4. Realistic includes timing – you can have everything you want, just not all at once.

Earlier, we talked about setting realistic goals. Realistic also covers timing and this leads us to the core message of this post. As I mentioned before, I set some huge goals. The problem was that I set these goals to be achieved simultaneously.

I was working a new, demanding full-time job as a manager, working a part-time teaching job, studying for a diploma, writing, and working on a plan for moving countries all at the same time. One by one I’ve had to postpone various goals. The effect it was having on my physical health, mental health and family life wasn’t worth it. In trying to achieve everything at once I stretched myself far too thin. I went through a particularly dark time but I’ve come out the other side stronger and clearer and I’ve had support from an amazing boss and mentor through this.

I’m recalibrating. I had to go back to my goals and values. I stripped everything back, identified the skills I need and the opportunities in front of me and re-prioritised accordingly. I’m already feeling much better physically and mentally and performing better at the areas I’m working on. By letting go I feel freer and more productive.

First to go was the diploma, then the part-time job and now the Series. As of now, the Series is officially on hiatus. It will get completed but I won’t set a completion date for it as I don’t want to let anyone or myself down further but it will get finished and I will continue to post on here separately too. You’ll know when it’s a Series post as it will be titled alphanumerically following the previous Series post.

What I’ve learnt from all this is that you can have everything you want, just not all at once. I believe I will achieve all of the goals I’ve set out to achieve but I’m staggering the timing on them now so that I’m not working on more than two at any one time (and ideally one wherever possible) until the work that is under my control is completed for each one.

Life is a journey. It can be a boring commute, the ride of your life or somewhere in between, it’s up to you. Set a course and make adjustments along the way – take control of the direction.

There are multiple pathways to what you want, but without choosing a direction, you’re guaranteed to get lost. What kind of journey do you want to have? Where do you want to go?