Quote:
Originally Posted by valis  what? Never set any personal goals for oneself? How do you plan to achieve what you want in life if you don't set any goals? Even planning for retirement is setting a goal for yourself. The question thus becomes how big a goal do you want to set for yourself. I've got several categories of goals; goals for this month, this year, and the next 3 years, all nicely mapped out and scheduled. I've had several things come up that threatened to derail the plans, but instead of letting them sway me, I simply take care of the issue at hand and continue on.
Then you have the bigger goals. Raise your kids right, get them to college (and kiss that retirement goodbye  ), but those are things that can't be measured in days, or weeks, or even years, but things that need to be re-enforced on a daily basis.
Having goals to achieve is a very important part about furthering yourself as a person and as a viable member of society. Just sitting stagnant and letting life take you where it will is something I strongly disagree with.
Just my plugged nickel's worth.
v |
Goal setting like this works for some people – but I’m sure many people don’t achieve goals despite doing all the right things. Some people don’t respond well to specific goals and deadlines.
Bottom line is many people do find great success without setting goals. But they do need commitment and passion (which isn’t the same thing). Going back to Xin's original post in this thread – Bill Gates and Will Smith could have given up without some form of inner drive and belief that this was their calling.
If clear goal setting works for you, great. Likewise goals may help to give you a loose structure that helps, even if you don’t follow the goals religiously. But I do think we should be too prescriptive of this as a technique that everyone should adopt. In my opinion the hard thing for most of us is finding a path we can pursue with commitment and passion. Setting goals to achieve things in fields we’re not willing to put the effort into is where most come unstuck.