Goals are cool. Goals are important, but too much time and effort is spent in thinking about and visualizing "the goal" and not enough time is spent thinking about and planning how the journey and all of the little steps of the journey to get to the goal. Ultimately it is the journey and not the goal that is most important!
Haiku:
setting goals is great
but the journey to the goal
is most important
The Pursuit of Happiness is a Wonderful Journey-- Enjoy it!
Hello -- Marc with the Gunnar Project. Again, the mission of the Gunnar Project is to inspire people how to pursue happiness.
One of the topics that seems to come up a lot, as we’re talking about creating these rituals, or doing these things that are going to allow you to pursue happiness every day, is goals. Honestly, I have a little bit of an issue with the way that goals are presented and sort of implemented in the literature and the things that I see. The problem with goals is that goals are things in time -- so everybody says “if I need to do this, then what I need to do is I need to set this out and then I need to start to break this down and say, if I’m going to get to here then I need to get to here -- and for me to get to here, I need to do these 3 things, and for me to do this very first thing, I need to do these little things down here…” And it’s broken down into these little milestones and these things that I”m going to attain -- that I’m going to achieve, or I’m going to learn or whatever that goal, whatever that milestone might be.
In reality, what is really critical and especially if you look at your happiness sort of in the same continuum, the thing that’s the most important is: Happy is not a place. Happiness is not a place. Happiness is really a journey. So, I love this whole idea of goals, and setting milestones and things, but I want to talk about, and I want to think about -- “What is that journey going to look like? What is that journey going to feel like?” as I’m getting to that next step. Getting to that next step is cool, it’s really nice, but I’m more concerned with how am I going to live my life during this journey -- what’s going to happen here (indicating between the steps)? If this is very exciting for me -- if that journey is really exciting -- if I can visualize myself just enjoying it, right, and even having a blast, and working and exceeding and excelling and accomplishing these things, and learning things -- if this journey to me is exciting, I’ve got a great chance of waking up tomorrow morning and just jumping on that journey and eventually if I do these things that this journey is going to entail, I’m going to get to that milestone. Which is awesome -- that’s cool!
The problem with the way that goals are thought about and taught right now -- it’s the milestone and what you’re supposed to do is you’re supposed to visualize and see “how cool is this going to be when I get to this point, when I have sold this much stuff, or when I’ve graduated from College, think how great that’s going to look…”. And again, those milestones are really cool, but if you haven’t visualized -- if you haven’t clearly set out to see “what does that journey look like -- what is that journey going to be day-to-day? Am I going to be truly engaged in that journey?” If I haven’t gone there, the chances of me actually implementing this are very slim.
There are all kinds of different analogies and stories about you know, I don’t get ten steps down the road, I don’t get a mile down the road, until I take that first step. And then that second step. And it’s this journey -- it’s all these steps in between here -- this is what you’ve got to get fired up about -- this is what you have to visualize yourself -- you need to be visualizing yourself engaged on this journey and on this path. It’s not so much the goals and the milestones you’re looking for… it’s really the journey that’s the trick -- the secret.
So again, this is Marc from the Gunnar Project -- thanks for listening and I look forward to talking to you again soon. Bye.