Interesting Living

Goals are exciting. They give us direction, focus, and something to channel our energy into. Achieving a goal (hopefully) creates something productive and gives us a sense of accomplishment. From making a ham sandwhich or building a rocket-ship, goals allow us to create the future we want. 

Goals are also fundamental to living a life in which our basic needs are met. We all need enough food, water, and shelter (which unfortunately relies upon having enough money) to survive. Without a goal of earning enough money to buy the food our bodies need, it would be difficult to stay afloat. 

Goals also serve us more at various stages of life. In the early stages of working, one may have a goal to progress their work and income so as to be able to provide for a future family. After losing fitness, someone may set a goal to get it back. It’s of note that goals tend to reflect what we value, and our desire to attain those things at various points throughout life. 

A self-confessed goal-aholic, I love setting a goal and working hard to figure out the best process of attaining that goal. To me there’s something exciting about being able to make something you want, and learn about yourself in the process. Optimisation and efficiency are keys to my approach. What is the most efficient use of my time? Am I applying the 80-20 rule correctly? Am I controlling the variables that are within my locus of control? Juicy stuff. 

As I’ve aged, I’ve begun to explore the trade-off of goal-directed focus. Despite goals having served me well, I wonder what other experiences I have missed. I became so good at saying ‘no’ in service of attaining my goals, a good friend once told me I needed to say ‘yes’ more often. Not that I regret any choices I’ve made, and nor will I ever know what the alternative was, but it’s interesting to think about what else life could’ve had for me. 

Goals are great, but they’re not exactly famous for providing fertile ground for interesting things to happen. I can’t think of a goal I have set for myself that I’d describe as ‘interesting’. I’ve done interesting things in my life, but rarely have they come as the result of a goal or outcome I have sought - more often they have come about from acting on intuition, feeling or simply doing something a little differently. 

In this way, my qualm with goals is that they tend to remove much of the ‘otherness’ of life. In focusing on a particular thing, we create structure and a narrowness to our experience that we forget about what else is out there. When we remove the inefficient and unstructured, we often remove the interesting. And it’s interesting that creates memories, shapes our sense of self and yields more opportunities than most goals ever will. 

Goals are excellent at producing outcomes, but outcomes are not necessarily always the goal. Most often in life the gold lies in the journey, or process, along the way. Goal-directed people tend to be outcome focused, but in doing so miss the fun or the learning that comes with the doing. Yes, having a vision and working towards it is fun (and I have certainly experienced this). Though doing things simply for the fun of them can be as rewarding as achieving an arbitrary outcome that we have set. 

Goals also create a margin of psychological safety. Having a clear goals gives someone a set of posts to aim for, giving that part of a person’s life structure and safety. We all love and enjoy safety - both of which are key elements of our comfort zone. However if we want to experience ‘other’ removing goal posts removes the margins we have arbitrarily confines ourselves too. When we do so, we might just find interesting. 

Not everything in life warrants a goal. Having a goal is useful when applied to the right task, however some things in life just are, and should be enjoyed without a ribbon waiting for us once completed. 

Some questions to ponder whether or not a goal is required:

1. Is there an objective that I need to meet? Reflect upon if the objective is in fact a need or an arbitrary end point you have set

2. Is there something here I could do a little differently than normal? Acknowledging that it may be inefficient, unknown or less ‘safe’. This also recognises self-imposed limits on your own path. 

3. What’s the most interesting way I could do this? 

The key is to discern between what needs a goal and what doesn’t. If you find the things that don’t need a goal, and do them differently, you mind find something interesting. Be. Play. Experience.