Life goals are the beacons that define the path of your very existence.
In the end, we may hit or miss our life goals. Yet, either way, we learn shedloads, grow hugely and develop massively from the experience.
A clearly defined life goal is never a waste of time.
Yet this piece takes you a step further in defining how you’re going to express your life purpose via your key goals.
Check out and answer the 5 questions below:
1: Who are you Going to Help?
As self-development guru (and mentor to legends such as Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy) Zig Ziglar puts it:
“You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”
Humans are a social species and our goals must impact others positively for our own sense of wellbeing.
Having a clearly defined purpose is a central part of masculine energy, yet that purpose is meaningless if it cannot be articulated in the value you offer the world.
This needn’t mean that you devote your life to crisis relief in disaster zones, a man can help others immensely by providing for his family, making his parents proud, supporting others in their career goals, or working for the betterment of human understanding via scientific research.
The specifics are down to you and your skills.
The important thing is that you are clear when defining your life goals how you are helping other people and why.
Having a clearly defined purpose is a central part of masculine energy, yet that purpose is meaningless if it cannot be articulated in the value you offer the world.
Being clear about how you will help others in your work is a huge defense against that inevitable point we all hit in our lives: confusion.
The world can be wild and change rapidly, yet knowing you provide something for someone in your daily life is a safeguard against misdirection.
So ask yourself: ‘Who am I helping in my life goals? And how?’
2: Why Do You Need Life Goals
Imagine a life without life goals. What does it look like?
Who would you be in this existence? How would you know where you are going?
It is a powerful exercise to consider your world without life goals and it is not without purpose.
The whole action brings us to a place of realization.
What you, me and everyone needs is tough love.
We need to be shocked into why we must follow our life goals assiduously and define them properly.
As a man, I am fully aware of the potential cost of straying from my commitment to solid life goals.
Without the boundaries that life goals put on my life, I could easily slip back into addiction, which could take everything from me.
My friends, my self-respect, this website itself, and even my life.
We walk a fine line in life between a beautiful life of discovery, growth and meaning, and a life of pain, misery and destruction as adult men.
Life goals and our commitment to them are our safeguards against taking the wrong path.
Dr Jordan Peterson refers to this in his explanation of life as a balance between chaos and order.
You must know how important life goals are to your life.
Not only is this to keep you focused on them, but also to galvanize you in your pursuit of them and remind you of their existential importance.
Life goals are the markers that make order from chaos.
4: When Do You Intend To Achieve Your Goals By?
Naturally, life goals are hard to define in terms of achievement.
The whole purpose of such a goal is to orient your very being to a human lifespan.
Yet simultaneously, you need a marker of completion otherwise the goal becomes meaningless.
An ideal way of managing this is by setting incremental goals between your higher goal.
For instance, if my goal is to earn a million in a year, my first goal could be to get the accreditations necessary to get me in the position to take a job that could get me such earnings.
My second goal could be to earn £250,000 in a year in 5 years’ time.
By structuring your goals in this way you can see the finish line, and see that each goal is more achievable than the end goal, thus keeping you in reach of a manageable target.
Further, if you achieve your goals before time, you have the time to restructure, just as you have the time to replan if you are not hitting your targets to hit your end goal.
5: How Are You Going to Deal With Setbacks?
Setbacks are a part of life. They will happen.
However, we are not measured on the inevitability of setbacks, but our response to them.
People with great ambition can take setbacks the hardest, and it is because of this you must garner a backup characteristic: resilience.
I love the Joseph Campbell quote below:
“We must be willing to get off the life we planned so as to have the life that’s waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell
It is exactly the mentality we need in life, for we can make the most accurate of life goals, yet something will unexpectedly hit us.
Therefore, the value of our life goals depends on how we can adapt to change.
We simply must learn to roll with the punches of life and reframe our life goals as adequate.
Below are two pieces to consider when defining your life goals and how you’ll deal with setbacks.
The reality is that we will not hit all of our life goals as we planned.
Being at peace with that and finding the lessons in failure, however, can be even more rewarding than success itself.
Therefore, creating Plan B’s and being mindful of setback is a tool of the wise.
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