If your plans are not reasonable, you will have a hard time accomplishing your goals. If your goals are not reasonable, you will either never achieve them, or you will sacrifice too much to obtain them.
What makes a goal unreasonable? Two things can make a goal unreasonable: 1) it conflicts with other goals. 2) It isn’t what you really want.
If you have too many goals, you might find that some of them are conflicting—you might need to sacrifice one in order to get the other, or you might have to postpone one for the other. Goals that conflict with other goals are too narrow or too broad; they fail to take into consideration your other wants and needs. If they are too broad, when you have conflicts you will prioritize the other goals. –At first I said that this makes a goal unreasonable; this is not entirely true. The goal is not unreasonable until it becomes impossible for you to do both.
Again, if you are willing to postpone one goal for another, then your goal is still somewhat reasonable as long as you can still accomplish both. However, you need to be cautious because no one can see into the future. While trading stocks in the stock market a person can both sell too early and sell too late.—sometimes when we choose to postpone our goals we miss out on the best possible moment for them or we postpone our goals only to discover that they are outdated or too challenging later in life.
Take for instance climbing Mount Everest; a person might postpone their goal of climbing and then get in a car accident that paralyzes them from the waist down. Or they might postpone their goal of climbing only to grow too old to climb. Had they gone they would have had meaningful experiences to draw on during the hard times of their life.
When you set a goal, you also need to be attached to that goal. Long-term goals take time and devotion, and if you don’t truly want that goal, you won’t feel motivated to accomplish it. Even if you do manage to accomplish that goal, it will not bring you satisfaction. You cannot set goals just because other people want you to do things; you will need to set goals that you want to reach. If not, in the end, they will not bring you the satisfaction that you want for all the work that you do. Or, when the trials and the challenges to accomplishing your goal kick in, you will have a worse time bearing through those challenges than if it were a goal you were attached to.
Having a goal is still better than not having any goals, but what really counts is the plans that you make in order to accomplish those goals. There is a good saying for this: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Failure happens when you don’t succeed at your goals. No one wants to fail; in fact, most people have a fear of failure. Even when you have reasonable goals, if you try to accomplish those goals in an indirect way, you may fail. For instance, you might have a reasonable goal to cook a good meal every day of the week but fail to plan correctly by not purchasing the ingredients necessary or allowing yourself enough time in your schedule to cook.—you could have reached that goal if you had made better plans.
What makes a good plan? A good plan is detailed, specific, and direct. A good plan includes how you will prepare, how you will execute it, and how you will track your progress, as well what steps you will take in case you are not on schedule (plan b). In the cooking example, in order to have a good plan, you would need to have all your ingredients, decide on what meals you will cook and how long they will take to make, and you might want to have a back-up plan of something simple to make in case you are running behind schedule or you misplace one of your ingredients.
After you have a good goal and a good plan, you need to ask yourself one last time what the big picture is:
- Why do you want to accomplish this goal?
- How much of a priority is it and how much are you willing to sacrifice for it?
- And is there another goal that would be better to work towards?
If you compare this goal to your other goals, which would you rather do? Do they have any immediate conflicts? What steps might you have to take in order to accomplish both goals on time? Are you willing to prioritize one goal over the other when conflicts arise? Will it be worth it still if you have to prioritize it over your other goals?
The ultimate “big picture” question is whether there is another goal that supersedes this goal. If you want to quit eating out because it’s expensive, a better goal would be to manage all of your finances—it may be possible for you to still eat out whenever you like, for instance, if you’d stop buying candy and pop at the gas station.
With an understanding of how to set reasonable goals and plans, you will be more successful in life and gain a greater satisfaction for accomplishing things. These goals will help you get what you want out of life and you will have a good understanding of how they will happen for you.
Now is a good time for you to re-evaluate your present goals and plans for the big areas of your life: career, school, family, marriage and spiritual. Are there any conflicts? Which is more important to you? If you postpone either of them, will you still be able to do them later? Will it be unnecessarily harder?
In the end, is it likely that things will turn out the way you expect them to? What do you need to do today in order to prepare to meet your goals?
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