Avoiding Goal Overkill

Goals are important, but are of little value without action to achieve them.

In the intro for Og Mandino's book The Greatest Secret in the World, he does include the standard initial "goal setting" part to the personal development process - but it is far briefer than usual.

The interesting (and very good) thing about the focus of this book is that it is all about replacing bad habits with good ones and living certain principles, not on prescribed methodologies for goal setting etc.

A very, very short goal-setting exercise

The intro that is provided to this exercise is:

"Now, I'm not going to ask you what you want from life. I'm not going to ask you to list your assets as they are now and then make a second list showing what you'd like them to be a year from now, five years from now... and so on. We don't need to go through all that "pipe dream success bookkeeping" you find in most self-help books."

Any of the above sound familiar from other self-help books you've read?

The four things this short exercise asks for:

• Present job title
• Present weekly income
• Job title, 45 weeks from now
• Weekly income, 45 weeks from now

The reason it's so short is also explained:

"...If you have improved your job title and your weekly income as much as I think you've indicated on that private memo to yourself then all the material things you want will come your way."

Goals are still important

The interesting thing is, one of the scrolls places a fair amount of emphasis on setting goals. The difference is, rather than asking the reader to spend loads of time on it, it is emphasised as being a core part of how you should live your life. A regular activity, setting clear goals to achieve on a short and long term basis.

We do live our lives by our habits and principles. They guide the decisions we make and actions we take every day.

Likewise, goal setting should be just something we do, not a big one-off exercise we do to pretend that we're going to do something about our aspirations.