Is Goal Setting Necessary?

A lot is said nowadays about setting goals. You have to have goals in order to get ahead in life, and if you don’t have goals you’ll never amount to anything.

But, are goals really necessary? If you don’t set specific goals, will your life simply stagnate where it is now? Will you ever get ahead?

The short answer is ‘yes’. Not having specific goals does not mean that you’ll never do anything. In fact, having loosely structured goals, or no goals at all can actually make it easier to get more out of life. If you aren’t constantly making decisions with your long-term goals in mind, you have the freedom to do things you want to do. If you simply do the things that make you happy, at the very least your quality of life will improve, and in a best-case scenario, you’ll be incredibly successful on top of being happy.

If you do feel that you need to set goals (I generally do), try to set goals that are somewhat loose for the long-term. If you insist that you have to have specific goals, limit them to one or two weeks in the future, and anything beyond that should be more loosely defined.

Let’s say that you’re unhappy at your current job, and decide you want a new one. If you know that your long-term goal is loosely defined as being “get a new job”, then you can simply set a goal for the current week of “apply for three new jobs”. The biggest advantage to this is that if you don’t have an entire plan set out, you can easily change your strategy at any time without feeling like you’re abandoning your plan.

Being able to change your strategy quickly is important in any project that you’re working on. By not having a complete structured plan, but instead just a general direction of where you’re going, you can adapt as new challenges crop up (which, face it, they always do), and you can better react to new opportunities.

Learn to set goals that enable you to get more from your life. Don’t set goals just for the sake of having goals. When you do set goals, only make them as specific as they need to be. You don’t have to have a plan for your entire life, and you’ll probably have a lot more fun if you take things as they come!

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