No Goals

Most of my adult life, I’ve been programmed to develop and work toward goals. Even for those of us who are not terribly goal-oriented, this is the time of the year that goals start to inch their way toward the center-stage of our lives. For the time being, we’re distracted by the holidays, and planning, and shopping, and cooking. But in the back of our minds, we’re already planning for those New Year’s resolutions.

I have a love-hate relationship with goals: on the one hand, they sometimes inspire me and light a fire under my butt; on the other hand anything other than 100% achievement can feel like failure.

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about living without goals, and reading what some proponents have to say about it. It goes something like this:

Goals place our focus on a picture of the future, causing us to feel a sense of lack in the present, and this can make us delay living fully until this vision of a hypothetical future is achieved.

Living without goals does not have to mean living without achievement, and we can still become doctors, open our own businesses, write novels or run marathons, if our actions are consistent with things we really want to do.

We'll know what we want to do and what to devote our time to on any given day, because, instead of relying on goals, we can be guided by principles.

Principles differ from goals in that they bring our attention to process and doing over results and getting, and, unlike goals, principles are always actionable, regardless of our current circumstances, freeing us to live the way we want right now, and not in some arbitrary future.

Footnotes:

Zen Habits: Achieving Without Goals
Google: "Ben Franklin's morning routine" (see image above)