Day 20: Setting Goals

Today you will start putting your purpose into practice by learning what goals are, why they are important to purpose, and how to set goals that lead to achieving your purpose.

Summary

What are Goals?

Goals are the individual steps required to actually achieve your purpose.

• The only way you are going to actually accomplish your purpose is by taking actions consistently day in and day out towards the pursuit of that purpose.
• At every moment, a person's mind is directed by some sort of intention. We're hardwired to need an aim, otherwise we are unable to navigate the world.
• We're always simultaneously at the point we are right now here, point a, which is usually a less desirable situation and moving towards point B, which we often deem is better in accordance with our explicit and implicit values. As modern human beings, we often do this as goals.

Why are Goals important to purpose?

Goals provide:

• Ambition and necessary structure to take action.
• A destination, a point of contrast against the present and a framework within which all things can be evaluated.
• Defined progress and makes such progress exciting and motivating.
• Reduction in anxiety because if you have no aim, everything can mean anything or nothing simultaneously.  Neither of those two options are gonna bring much happiness into your life.

The brain is always trying to predict what is about to happen next and how much energy will be required by that situation.

• To make those predictions three systems come into play information, acquisition, pattern recognition, and goal direction.
• We take in information, find connections between this information and prior experience, and then filter out those results through our goals to decide what to do next.

We reach equilibrium in a state of human thriving when we have a direction and we're moving forward towards a goal.

• Real thriving happens you're attempting to move forward toward a worthwhile goal and you find fulfillment through purpose that motivates and directs your efforts towards that goal.
• People experience positive emotion in relation to the pursuit of a valuable goal, not necessarily reaching it. It's the pursuit that is important.

The opposite of having goals is having nothing to aim at at all.  

• If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing of high value in your life which could lead to needless suffering in your life.

For these reasons, we have to envision our future and establish our direction which requires setting goals for ourselves, creating an aim of something that we're working towards.

How to Set goals to achieve your purpose

There are three types of goals to set:

• Purpose Goal: An overarching mission statement for your life aimed at the highest possible good. Something that's large and audacious, and probably brings a significant change to an industry community, or even the planet.  It's a clear why behind everything that you're going to do.
• Milestone Goals: Manageable near future chunks of our Purpose Goal that we can apply various strategies to and take action upon in pursuit of our Purpose Goal.
• Process Goals: Manageable and repeatable tasks conducted on a daily basis that build up to achieving our Milestone Goals.

How will you know when your work is done each day? When you do good work, done well, and for the right reasons.

• By reflecting on this every single day you will gain fulfillment in just the process goals and just the daily actions.
• So even if you never reached a milestone goal or you never reached your purpose, you're finding meaning, fulfillment and happiness in your day to day life.

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Activity

Take the purpose you have developed in this course and break that purpose down into milestone goals, stepping stones that help you get to that purpose.

Then identify the first milestone goal and break that down into daily tasks that you could start doing today in order to reach your purpose.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.