Is it important to have goals?

I used to think that everyone has goals. To be honest, not always, but after a certain point in time in my life. In the early stages of my life, the people around me were those who were simply trying to make their ends meet. Families living on unpredictable daily wages — having goals related to protecting their kids, staying out of trouble, and earning to meet their needs. This starkly contrasts with the last 10 years of my professional life. Here we’ve been told day in and day out that the power of having a goal (a vision) and to keep moving towards it is the open formula for achieving anything great. Interestingly enough, I’ve been passing on similar ideas to my teams, in various forms, on how and why is it important for us to have quarterly goals and to keep moving towards our vision.

Recently, in one of our office discussions on setting goals, few members argued in the favour of not having goals altogether. Without giving a deeper context of the discussion, the general sense of argument was — “Having the goals we have, is not helping us become less clueless about our day to day work”. Or in other words — the goals are not directly translating into a ‘Why’ for our daily actions.

Credits: http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-16

I could see where people supporting not have goals were coming from, but found it difficult to convince them. So, I decided to give a deeper thought to the importance of goals. I started by asking a few questions to myself:

1. What’s the core benefit of setting a goal (or a core disadvantage of not setting one)?
2. Is there a risk in having a goal?
3. Should a person/team have different types of goals?
4. Is there a good goal/bad goal in terms of structural effectiveness? What differentiates the two? so that we can choose better goals.
5. Can someone live without goals?

I’m writing my thoughts below on each of the questions. Requesting anyone who reads this blog post to either comment your thoughts or to guide me to a source where I can dig deeper.

1. What’s the core benefit of setting a goal
   The main benefit is that you cannot focus your energies unless you have a goal in mind. You keep shifting your destination. As a result of which, there is a lot of movement but not much displacement. The core benefit, therefore, in my opinion, of having a goal, is focus. The presence of a goal creates a possibility for actions aligned towards it and cancels out any non-aligned activity as a distraction. Repeated, focussed, daily action, when compounds, takes you much farther than diffused actions.
2. Is there a risk of having a goal?
   I don’t have an example from my life but I think a great risk in setting a goal is that it could makes you fearful/weak and take you to the ‘dark side’ of the path. Let’s say I am starting a new youtube channel where I’m posting stuff related to politics and elections. If my goal is based on number of views, it will be tempting for me to focus on the stories around a controversial politician rather than to focus on improving the quality of my journalism. Also, once I’m succesful, I might have to do more such stuff to keep the views coming. Sounds simplistic, but it’s just an example. Therefore, my suggestion is to have goals that will make you strong over a long term.
3. Should a person/team have different types of goals?
   This is a tricky one, so far I’ve divided goals into 4 different kinds as given below:
   i) Vision-based goals: These are inspired from dream states — may never be achieved but can always be clearly worked towards.
   ii) Milestone-based goals: These are tangible goals which can be measured and can be planned in time. E.g. I’ll get married before I’m 35 or We’ll clock 1 Million USD in MRR before Dec 2018 are milestone-based goals.
   iii) Personality-based goals: These are goals about the mindset, habits, personality, value system of the person/team. I’m not sure whether this is a goal type but I was having difficulty in fitting — “developing a good sense of humor”, and “improving my writing skills” in the first two types.
   iv) Trigger goals: These are largely financial goals which can easily be categorized under milestone based goals. But a lot of times, these goals are planned as safety nets, or an asset which can be acquired — these can then trigger other goals. Which is why I have kept it separate as a lot of times, such goals are being pursued as a trigger to other goals.
4. Is there a good goal/bad goal in terms of structural effectiveness?
   The primary check I apply is that any goal which doesn’t translate to a daily action is not a real goal. Which is why having “I need to lose weight” is less effective a goal (in my opinion) as compared to “I need to workout daily for 25 minutes”. Also, when we are learning something new, aiming to use the knowledge makes it more powerful as a goal. E.g “I need to learn python” is better substituted by “I need to learn python to create a script that automates my newsletter”. Lastly, as I said earlier, goals that conflict with more meaningful goals in your hierarchy are bad goals as they can make you weak. For example — “Writing one blog post daily” is a bad goal if it conflicts with your goal of “Improve the quality of every blog post”.
5. Can someone live without goals?
   Honestly, I don’t know how to best answer this question. Even if you are not conscious of your goals, the patterns that you follow as your daily actions, thoughts, and habits will definitely lead you somewhere based on their nature and based on the environment that you’re in. But I still asked this question, not only because of my childhood experience but also because of my philosophical musings by reading J. Krishnamurti. (Read the article below if you want to get into more details)

Why Goals And Results Are Important To Us

To end this chain of thought, I’m reminding myself that the starting point of my goals is what I’m able to see. Should then one of the most fundamental goals be — To be able to see more clearly? Or, do we see based on what we’re aiming at?

Good wishes!