Should You Set Goals?
I was recently digging through Steve Pavlina’s Goal setting category and came across and interesting post about goal free living. I have been writing a lot about the goals that I set for myself and marking down when I finish them and trying to allow everyone to follow my progress and learn from how I set my goals, high or low. In Steve’s article he discusses a book he had read called, Goal Free Living.
The view the book puts forward, as Steve states, is not to go through life living without goals, but rather not live in accordance with rigid goals that shape your life too much and could take away from valuable experiences otherwise had. Both Steve and the author write about having goals that define your life too much and don’t allow you to respond to certain situations that present themselves to you.
This is one reason why having short term goals, and goal setting can help you in the long run. Allowing yourself to have small short term goals that you can easily let pass without too much hurt to the overall picture will help you adjust to what life throws at you. Goals that are long term seldom ever get done and won’t keep you motivated to work towards them. You begin to feel restricted and eventually do nothing rather than working towards and accomplishment.
To put in into perspective that some of you bloggers and Internet entrepreneurs may find useful, think about all those goals you’ve set for yourself to get websites published and blogs into the Google rankings. Those stores you want making money passively and those AdSense sites that are beginning to pile up. You may be working feverishly trying to find the next tip to get you on the first page of Google Search Results when something even better could have been on the next thread in that forum you were reading. Your mind could be too closed because you’ve set a goal to get 500,000 visitors in a month (who would do that :)). Keep your eyes open and even though you said you wanted to make $100 a day blogging, maybe someone already offered you a solution to make $1000 a day doing nothing. You were just too busy working towards your goals to realize it happened.