http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/goal-free-living/ Personal Development for Smart People Fri, 16 May 2008 10:22:41 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/goal-free-living/#comment-59284 How to avoid big score mentality Fri, 16 Nov 2007 01:55:24 +0000 http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/goal-free-living/#comment-59284 [...] I think this is where most people become disheartened.  They lose confidence in themselves because of the bigness of the goal.  If you aren’t able to conceptualise the stages or phases required to build your goal then you will you find yourself becoming discouraged.  Set your self progress targets towards the goal on a month by month basis.  How much closer are you to realising it?  Measure it against the end result and see you will be pleasantly surprised.   To continue my previous point, see the steps as ‘phases in reaching the big score’.  A man I know has a dream of being a millionaire.  But for every dollar he makes he spends at least 50% on lottery, gambling or other means of big score dreams.  I am not joking when I say if he had of put at least half of his money away for an extended period of time he would be just about there by now.  The promise of an immediate payoff for no real effort in his mind is greater than the possibility he will make sustained money over a period of time.  This is what we call the gambler’s fallacy.   While my friend has deep seeded mental reasons for his gambling addiction and this in part explains his behaviour.  Most of us do not recognise just how successful we could be if we consistently saw our big goals as a set of steps or goals to be reached.  Instead, I think we see the desire and think well that’s what I will have at the expense of setting short term goals and reaching those targets over a period of time. [...] […] I think this is where most people become disheartened.  They lose confidence in themselves because of the bigness of the goal.  If you aren’t able to conceptualise the stages or phases required to build your goal then you will you find yourself becoming discouraged.  Set your self progress targets towards the goal on a month by month basis.  How much closer are you to realising it?  Measure it against the end result and see you will be pleasantly surprised.   To continue my previous point, see the steps as ‘phases in reaching the big score’.  A man I know has a dream of being a millionaire.  But for every dollar he makes he spends at least 50% on lottery, gambling or other means of big score dreams.  I am not joking when I say if he had of put at least half of his money away for an extended period of time he would be just about there by now.  The promise of an immediate payoff for no real effort in his mind is greater than the possibility he will make sustained money over a period of time.  This is what we call the gambler’s fallacy.   While my friend has deep seeded mental reasons for his gambling addiction and this in part explains his behaviour.  Most of us do not recognise just how successful we could be if we consistently saw our big goals as a set of steps or goals to be reached.  Instead, I think we see the desire and think well that’s what I will have at the expense of setting short term goals and reaching those targets over a period of time. […]

]]> http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/goal-free-living/#comment-13753 Should You Set Goals? » Erik Vossman’s Goals Weblog Sat, 17 Jun 2006 11:08:35 +0000 http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/goal-free-living/#comment-13753 [...] I was recently digging through Steve Pavlina’s Goal setting category and came across and interesting post about goal free living. I have been writing a lot about the goals that I set for myself and marking down when I finish them and trying to allow everyone to follow my progress and learn from how I set my goals, high or low. In Steve’s article he discusses a book he had read called, Goal Free Living. [...] […] I was recently digging through Steve Pavlina’s Goal setting category and came across and interesting post about goal free living. I have been writing a lot about the goals that I set for myself and marking down when I finish them and trying to allow everyone to follow my progress and learn from how I set my goals, high or low. In Steve’s article he discusses a book he had read called, Goal Free Living. […]

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