Why Set Goals

If you have no goals for today, tomorrow, next week or next year, you are wasting away in the comfort zone. Goals create automatic conflict with the comfort zone. A goal is about something that is not. A goal defines something that you would like to have that is currently not available to you. Any goal requires leaving the comfort zone. Goals require that we get off of life’s couch.

How many of us set long-term goals and seek to achieve them? An insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut conducted a survey about that a few years ago. The answer was that only 3 percent of people had specific written long-range goals. Some set goals. But if their goals are not written down the siren call of comfort will likely be too much to resist. Goals that move us are almost always written down. A goal that is not written is merely a wish. Goals that are written down, and then shared with another, move us even more. Long-term goals defined by intermediate steps that are written and then also shared, will almost always catapult us out of our comfort zone and into the kind of activity that leads to real happiness.