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?