Personal Discovery: Future Aspirations Part 1

In order to take the next steps in your life, it often helps to actually know where we are heading and if that direction is where we actually want to go. Often, when people ask us what our future aspirations are, we rattle off an occupation or career that we are working towards but how often do we think about why we are working towards that in the first place? How do we know if we have succeeded in what we were working towards?

What exactly is success anyways?

There was a man, a new graduate from business school named Tom, who went to the Philippines for vacation. One day, while walking along the beach, he noticed a fisherman pulling in his boat with the day’s catch in it. He went over to examine it and to talk to the fisherman.

Tom: How long did it take to catch the fish?
Fisherman: Only a few hours.
Tom: Was it easy to catch the fish?
Fisherman: Easy if you know what to do.
Tom: What are you going to do with the fish?
Fisherman: I think I’ll sell some of them to the nearby market. Then I’ll fry some up and eat them. The rest I’ll give to my friends.
Tom: So, what do you do the rest of the day?
Fisherman: Probably just go visit some friends. We’ll relax on the beach and drink beer and make music and talk and enjoy.
Tom: You seem to have a lot of time on your hands. Well! Today is your lucky day! I just graduated from business school, the top of my class. With my business expertise and your fishing expertise, we can start our own fishing company! You would spend more time fishing and catch a lot more fish and then I can sell those fish into bigger and better markets. Soon we could afford a bigger more high-tech boat to catch more fish!
Fisherman: Then what?
Tom: Well, then, we’d eventually own a large fleet of top-of-the-line fishing boats. We could sell to international markets and become very rich!
Fisherman: Then what?
Tom: Well, then we would save up all that money and invest it in the right projects to make more money. We could become multi-billionaires.
Fisherman: Then what?
Tom: Well, then…then we’d retire together and we’d relax on the beach, drink beer, make music, and talk all day.

This story illustrates the very important difference between knowing exactly what you want and being deluded into only thinking you know what you want out of your life. The fisherman was happy. He knew what he wanted and what he wanted was to relax with his friends and eat yummy fish. And he knew how to obtain what he wanted. Tom didn’t really know what he wanted. He thought that he wanted money and to be rich and own a lot of property. That was his dream. What he didn’t realize was that what he really wanted was exactly what the fisherman already had. We have to figure out exactly WHY we want the things we want and what exactly were are working towards. In this way, we can know which direction to go or know if we’re heading down a wrong direction, pursuing things that will ultimately give us results that aren’t desired, or wanting things that won’t satisfy us in the long run. To understand the reason why can also give us the confidence to go ahead with what we do think our goals should be.

There was a hamster that lived in a cage. He hated it there and wanted to escape above all else. So hour after hour, day after day, he gnawed at his cage. He gnawed until his teeth were ground down to little nubbins and yet he still didn’t give up. What he didn’t know was that he was one bar away from the latch. If only he had shifted right just a little bit, he would have been able to work himself free eventually. But, instead, he just kept gnawing away at the wrong bar and never escaped from that cage.

We have a lot of goals in life. Some are good ones and some that can be misguided. To understand which goals we should pursue, we have to understand why we are pursuing them and how to go about it the right way. Otherwise, we’ll just end up working and working and never getting anywhere we want, just like the hamster.

Activity:

Write down your key goals in life.  Doesn’t matter what it is. Just write down what you’re working towards. What do you want? Is it a partnership with that firm? Is it a home? Is it to travel around the world? Is it to have a starring role in a movie? Whatever it is, write it down.

Then pick one of them and write it down on the Goal Worksheet [find it in the worksheet section] For each goal, it’s time to act like a toddler who just learned the word WHY? Ask WHY? at least three times, though you are free to ask as many times as you want, and write down your answers.

Goal: I want to travel around the world. WHY? Because I like to experience new cultures. WHY? Because I like to figure out how cultures around the world are similar and different. WHY? Because I want to find a way for people around the world to relate to each other peacefully.}

So, using this example, questioning my reasoning behind this goal hasn’t dissuaded me from traveling around the world. In fact, it makes me want to do it even more but now I know what to focus on when I plan out my travels. It lets me get exactly what I want out of my travels rather than merely wandering aimlessly. Not only does this make me want to travel more, now that I know my key desire is to help people from different cultures relate to each other, I can find more opportunities around me perhaps even in my own neighborhood to indulge myself in what I really like to do. This not only narrows my focus in some aspects but it widens my perspective in other aspects. So for each goal you have, do the same, and see if it helps to focus or widen your perspective. For many of these goals, you will find yourself with a greater desire to go after them and for other goals, you may find that your desire to do them has lessened but you understand more your motivations for pursuing them. In that case, perhaps other goals, which may better fulfill your motivations, may arise.

In our current society, the technology and changing market situations change so quickly, there are occupations which have been born and become outdated within one person’s lifetime. Therefore, especially among the younger generation, they are less and less focused on having life-long careers so it is even more imperative to understand where our true passions lie. Then, no matter what happens in the global marketplace, a person can adapt accordingly based on their unique focus and interests.

Now that you have a better idea of where you’re going and why you’re going there, it’s time to draw yourself a map to get there. For each goal you want to pursue, we have to make them more easily attainable. The way to do this is to make SMART goals:

• S-Specific– design a goal that actually sounds like a goal. World peace is all very well but how will we know when we reach it? It’s better to have the goal of passing a human rights law. At least we will know exactly when we have attained it.

• M-Measurable– make that goal so that we can track its progress and measure how far along we have come. It is useful to have specific milestones along the way.

• A-Attainable– make that goal something that you really believe is within your reach. This is something where you can apply your new understanding of yourself to decide whether or not this is something you can reach. It’s good to reach a little further than what you think you can. However, everyone has different limits and you have to understand yours.

• R-Realistic– make a goal that is possible in this current world. For instance, it cannot defy the laws of science or wishing to be a supermodel when you’re shorter than 5 feet.

• T-Timely– make a goal that has a time-line. In giving yourself a deadline, you push yourself more to attain it in that time. This is also a good way of measuring how far you have come or need to go in your goals. This is used in conjunction with the measurable part of formulating goals.

Everyone has different goals and different ways of getting there based on our own unique mix of talents and ways of working. What does it take to reach your personal goals? Of course to accomplish goals, we have to work towards them but it can be difficult to know where or how to begin. In any situation that can seem overwhelming, it helps to break up the situation into smaller parts making it easier to deal with. If we take this further, we can keep breaking up the smaller pieces into still smaller pieces again and again until the pieces are so small that it becomes very simple and quick to accomplish. For each of these tiny steps we accomplish, we are one step closer to attaining that goal.

Activity: 

Go back to the goal you noted down on your Goal Worksheet.  Now, we’re going to modify them to make them SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. Write down the modified goal on the bottom.  That’s the goal we’re going to work on.  Once we have our goal really worked out, it’s time to get cracking on them.

Grab some paper.  Take the newly modified goal and split them up into major action steps. Then split each action step into more action steps. Repeat until you have a list of little baby action steps you can take to get to your ultimate goal. Now, the hard part: go out and do the first tiny action step for each goal by the end of this week. You will be officially one step closer to fulfilling your goal. How does it feel? Do more if you’d like. Try to do at least 1 baby action step each week.

The most successful goals require a combination of talent and interest. Talent without interest may succeed in the short-run but it will become drudgery quickly, becoming hard to sustain when the almost-inevitable hard times come. Interest without talent can be sustained for a while during both good and bad times but often a person will reach a certain limit that they can’t go beyond. It can be a solid goal but very difficult to become much beyond average. To have both talent and interest means you will like doing it enough to sustain you during hard times or failure and you will be good enough at it to make it eventually as successful as you want it to be.