Goal setting is a foundational tool for achieving your dreams. Business leaders, athletes, and leaders of nations set defined goals as a means to measure progress, determine courses of action, and making change happen. Goal settings help focus your attention on the things you really matter. It helps chart daily actions that lead to a happier life and increased personal success. Achieving the goal is not nearly as important as enjoying the journey, however. The purpose of the goal is who in become in the pursuit of it.
Here is a list of powerful reasons why goal setting is important to your life goals:
13. SMART goals determine your level of success.
A study from Harvard Business School found that people who had written goals earn 10x more than their classmates. Imagine that the simple act of writing down a goal increases the likelihood of success in life. Get a piece of paper and write down your career goals today!
12. Defined goals create a sense of commitment.
The time to set goals is not January 1st, 20XX, it's now. When you commit to achieving a goal, it creates a habit that you keep. Let's say you are planning to run a marathon this year, the goal of running 26.2 miles continuously helps you commit to running on a weekly basis. With any good habit, you are able to provide evidence to who you are becoming. It helps shape your identity as a runner, which creates a lifetime of action.
11. Specific goals help prioritize the things that matter.
Getting specific with goals is always the tricky part. We often find ourselves with too many things to do but too little time to do them. Helping create goals that are specific allows you to narrow the scope and focus on the things that matter. We can eliminate all the goals that don't contribute to our long-term mission, and just laser-focus in on the things that'll move the needle in the long-run.
10. Personal goals allow us to dream bigger.
There is no better feeling than the journey towards achieving your goal. Imagine running through the finish line of a marathon and seeing that you were able to do something that you previously thought was impossible. Accomplishing goals helps you dream bigger, and set higher goals as you continue to walk on your personal development journey. Create a life that people can make inspirational quotes about.
9. The goals you set help you focus on what you want, not what you don't want.
Saying "no" is just as important as saying "yes". We often get distracted by things that are "nice-to-have", but doesn't contribute to our overall mission and identity. Set goals for yourself that allow you to recklessly slash out all the things that are not important, and waste zero effort by not pursuing them.
8. Stretch goals help you grow.
The place of growth happens right outside of our comfort zone. If I'm able to run 1 mile today, I can stretch the difficulty to 1.1 miles next week. Setting goals that are just challenging enough helps us to be able to increase our level of success. If I get 1% better every day, by the end of the year, I'd have become 37X better than where I started out. Nothing more powerful in this universe than compound interest.
7. Achieving goals bring inner peace.
Setting the goal and falling in love in the journey helps bring inner peace because you are constantly progressing. The worst pitfall in life is getting stuck in a place of stagnancy, where you are no longer growing. Create and fall in love with a life that allows you to be great by your own standards. Remember, you are only competing against yourself.
6. Goals help you get up in the mornings.
The importance of goal setting and achieving is the fact that it helps you live for something. Imagine a kid that is looking forward to going to Disneyland. They are so excited that they can barely sleep. They wake up early and have the energy to go play for the entire day. Create goals in your life that get you excited in the morning. Create a vision that is invigorating, and flood your energy and your spirit into it. Goals help us live a better life.
5. Goals bring you closer to who you want to be.
As humans, we all have an identity that we take pride in. There is an ideal version of that person that is loving, kind, generous, and brave that we want to be. As a course of achieving our goals, we find that the journey often takes us closer to the idealized version of ourselves.
4. Setting goals gives you direction in life.
Direction helps guide us to the right destination. If we are going to New York, but we do not have the right direction, we might just end up in Arkansas. Setting goals is like inputting your destination in a GPS. It helps orient us towards the place we want to be.
3. Achieving your goals allow your to momentum shift.
When we achieve a goal, we are able to take that momentum and apply it into something else. Say I just completed my goal to do a triathlon. I can now take my impeccable physical shape and knowledge of my body and begin applying it towards running a marathon. Using the momentum from a success allows us to gain traction to break through our own doubts.
2. Goals raise your standards.
When you are in a habit of hitting and raising your goals, you will find that you want to continue progressing. Over the course of time, you will look back and realized that today you are capable of things that you couldn't imagine doing 10 years ago. The importance of goal setting is that it allows us to keep taking aim at the next thing, and helps us to continue to grow.
1. Enjoying the pursuit of a goal gives us a happier life.
At the end of the day, we all want to live in a state of absolute bliss. We want to wake up in the morning energized, and be able to go to sleep with a smile on our faces. By putting the right goals in front of us, we are able to take massive action towards where we want to be and work towards changing our circumstances day by day. By turning this wheel of life, we will find ourselves in a much happier place and enjoy success like we never imagined.