I love setting ambitious goals:
- Goals help me to measure progress.
- Goals help set the direction for my business.
- Goals enable me to set priorities for my time and investments.
- Goals can align my team around shared priorities.
I lived a lot of my life chasing goals, and it helped me make progress in my business. AND
- Goals can make me myopic – I chase the goals even when the situation has changed.
- Goals make me feel great when I’m achieving them, and they can be disappointing when I don’t (even when achieving them wasn’t in my best interest).
- When I’m over-invested in my goals, I can lose perspective on the rest of my life.
I’m now more cautious about investing myself too fully in chasing arbitrary numbers, achievements, and outcomes. I see them more as self-imposed goal posts that I move on myself more often than not!
Living in the present moment and choosing shorter-term goals has been very freeing without a huge loss in clarity or progress.
What’s your relationship to your goals like? Do you set goals? Do you measure yourself against them? If not, what do you do instead?
