In personal development, goals have been touted as an effective means for change for a while now. Throughout this time what it it means to set a goal and how to structure them to be effective has varied greatly. We seem to know that goals over the short term help us to accomplish more. It forces us to stretch ourselves to accomplish more than we would normally expect of ourselves. The difficulty in understanding goals more is how broad the definition of it is. A goal could be something you want to do everyday or something you want done over the next 10 years. Generally though, goals should be viewed as being set over longer periods of time rather than simply what you want to do each day. What is concerning is our ability to keep the effectiveness up over the long term. This seems to be because of the burden it places on us.
Arbitrary Selection
To a large degree, goals are arbitrarily set. We pick random points to set our goals that don’t necessarily have any meaning to us. This is compounded by also making the timeline for the goal arbitrary. This leaves us with the burden of arbitrarily setting goals that can lack actual meaning to us. This can work short term as you are close to the point in which you set it. The issue is that long term it lacks the resiliency to stay meaningful over time.
Abstracting The Destination
Goals are a means to an end. They are supposed to help us to get to the destination faster than we would have without them. The issue with goals is exactly what makes them great. They break the journey to our destination into smaller chunks to allow us to get to it better. This becomes a problem because it abstracts away the destination. Instead of knowing where the end destination is, all we see is each marker as we try to constantly get to the next one. This idea of setting markers along the way can also lead us to get lost while having the feeling of getting somewhere. This is because we can set the markers without knowing where exactly we are going. We constantly set short term goals without knowing the long term goal. This is what leads us to lose sight of our goals as time goes on.
Future Discounting
Setting goals is all about sacrificing something today for something better tomorrow. If this wasn’t the case we wouldn’t need goals. However, when we start setting long term goals we tend to miscalculate our discounting of rewards in the future. We usually fail to take into account that what it takes to get to the goal has to be outweighed by the reward we get for the goal. This is why some goals simply shouldn’t be set as we will stop making sacrifices today as we realize it’s not worth it for the end goal. That is another burden we face as we constantly have to evaluate our future discounting as we progress through a goal. Goals for working out and eating right tend to fail as we start to reach diminishing returns and no longer think what we will get when reaching the goal will justify what we are passing up today.
