Life in the Navajo Nation: Setting Goals vs. Achieving Goals
July 1, 2010Daniel No Comments »Yesterday, I gave a presentation on goal-setting to our students. Goal-setting is something I started practicing three years ago, and it has helped me gain a lot of clarity in determining what is truly important to me and in knowing exactly what kind of person I want to be.
You’ll have to become a bigger person in order to achieve bigger goals, and who you become by achieving your goals is worth far more than what you could ever gain tangibly.
That’s not to belittle the quantifiable benefits of goal-setting. According to Dave Kohl, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech., 80% of Americans say they don’t have goals. 16% do have goals, but they don’t write them down. Less than 4% write down their goals, and fewer than 1% review them regularly.
That 1% earns 9 times as much over the course of their lives as those who do not write down their goals.
During the presentation, I focused more on the practical aspects of goal-setting: putting down your goals in writing, finding a support group of people who have goals similar to yours, reviewing and updating your goals regularly, determining emotionally compelling reasons for the goals that you set, etc.
But after reading this wonderful speech by William Deresiewicz today (you won’t regret taking 20 minutes to read it!), I’m reminded that the essence of goal-setting is the setting of goals, not the achieving of goals. Yes, there are many practical techniques which I’ve employed to fulfill goals in areas such as physical health, friends/relationships, personal growth and contribution to the community. The beauty of goal-setting, however, lies in knowing what things are worth doing– not in doing more things. Busyness is not synonymous with fruitfulness, and activity does not necessarily lead to impact and influence.
To borrow an analogy from Stephen Covey, goal-setting is less about finding the best ladder-climbing methods and more about ensuring that the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
If you’re not a goal-setter, will you commit to becoming one today? And ff you’re already one, may I encourage you to put the “being” before the “doing”– so that every goal you set and achieve will bring you closer to becoming that ideal person you want to be.
I’ll leave you with this excerpt from Deresiewicz’s speech:
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.
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