“Life coaches” kill me.
Thank goodness I always rise from the dead and live to write and edit another day.
These life coaches and self-help gurus tell us we must have goals in life or we will become mediocre.
Fact is, writing down our goals and expounding on them robs us of our valuable and limited time.
Goals should be simple: get into UC Santa Barbara, get through rehab without a relapse, help your best friend fight her addiction, lose twenty-five pounds of fat in six months.
Not some 20-page declaration that takes months to write. Meanwhile, you’re obsessing over those goals and not accomplishing anything meaningful.
Marshall Goldsmith Tells It Like It Is
I like what Marshall Goldsmith has to say in his article in Harvard Business Review:
“Goal obsession is one of the greatest problems that I encounter in my interactions with successful people. Goal obsession occurs when we become so focused on achieving our goal (or task) that we forget our larger mission.”
“One of my favorite movies is the Academy Award winner, The Bridge on the River Kwai. In this movie, the star, Colonel Nicholson (played by Alec Guinness) becomes so obsessed with his goals— build a great bridge and improve troop morale—that he completely forgets his mission—winning the war. At the end of the movie, he realizes that he has been building a fantastic bridge to support the wrong army and exclaims, ‘What have I done?’
“Your life is your life. It is not my place to tell you how you should live it. I would just suggest that you ask yourself two challenging questions:
• What are the most important values in my life? Are my values reflected in the way I spend my time?
• What is my mission as a human being? Am I ever becoming so focused on achieving my goals, that I forget this mission?
“At the end of life, you don’t want to look back like Colonel Nicholson and ask, ‘What have I done?’ ”
Begin With Simple
Write down something simple, plan a general outline, do a little research, figure out a good path, then jump right in. You can always change things up while you’re in the middle of learning and doing.
Being flexible is key to successfully navigating treacherous waters.
Goals aren’t even a proper roadmap or outline of success, although those same life coaches tell us that’s all we need to succeed: follow the path to your goal.
First things first, though: you must define what success is for you personally, not for Tiger Woods or George R.R. Martin or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
For you, success may come when you graduate from college, serve your country honorably in the US military, land a dream job in advertising, or become a mother.
To graduate from college, you then get to apply to your favorite schools, get accepted, do what it takes to do well in school, and finally get your diploma.
To get your honorable discharge from, say, the US Air Force, you enlist or get a commission, get placed in a great field, do an outstanding job for at least four years, then receive your honorable discharge and move on to the next phase of your life.
Like what Marshall Goldsmith said above, define for yourself what your values are. They will assist you in determining how to proceed and which path to take and when.
Goals in and of themselves are meaningless.
You Are You, Beyonce is Beyonce
Success isn’t about comparing yours to someone else’s, though our society shames us if we aren’t the next Beyonce or writing the next Game of Thrones script or sitting in the Oval Office.
How saddening it is that our own society condemns us before we even begin our lifelong journey. Society also strips us of our own humanity and sense of self. Then it turns around and, in some twisted fashion, encourages us to be ourselves.
A middle school in Durham, NC brought in some popular drag queens to tell students, “Being different is okay.” This, after decades of being told to abandon your sense of self in favor of some societal standard.
You are you, so design your life based on your wishes and wants, desires and wishes, and your absolute needs in life. If you happen to become the next hot pop star, good for you. But I’ll bet your name won’t be Beyonce.
“If I don’t look like a supermodel on the runway, that’s OK because I look good in my own way.”
—Caroline Wozniacki
Which Goals Are Realistic to You?
This snap of a line of lemmings (the new LOL) waiting to summit Mt. Everest needs no introduction or caption. LOL, indeed.
Remember: Success Comes in Two Parts
Short-term triumphs reward you with precious gifts and valuable lessons. They build your self-confidence and allow you to move to a higher level. There are no shortcuts during this elementary education. Many brilliant kids and young adults skip many of these initial steps, find stardom for a few years, then come crashing down because they hit a brick wall and did not have the skills to cope with that failure.
However, if you continue to learn gradually over the years, you begin to develop a mastery all your own. It’s normally from this level, which takes about ten years, that the “overnight success” is then discovered and thrust into the spotlight.
Long-term prosperity happens because of your persistence and perseverance and good work in your early years, taking great care not to skip important steps along the way.
And as you grow older, wiser and more experienced, you find that your goals seem to write themselves, leaving you to focus on the magnificent little details of your journey.
MEET YOUR AUTHOR
Tripsy South is a freestyle writer and editor. She’s the author of the quirky novel, SUICIDE TANGO: My Year Killin’ It With A Shrink.