Death Bed Goal Setting
If we have a strong enough sense of who we are and what we value, we can navigate to rewarding aspirations even if some of those goals unfortunately need to change their shape and focus.
I’m reading the book Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau. It’s been a great reminder for me to not lose sight of thinking big and setting audacious goals and striving to live the life I want and dream about rather than staying inside my comfort zone. I get the sense that if I had read the book fifteen years ago, I would have full-hearted embraced all of it and had even felt validation because I was a goal setting fiend back then. Case in point when I was thirteen, I read John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and decided then and there that I would become the world’s first international chancellor.
I’m still very much goal oriented. And I think I still have big dreams for myself. But what I’ve come to realize is that, while setting big goals, I also need to really focus on each day as it comes rather than just calculating for the future. I was so interested in striving for more and to become more every day at thirteen and now I’ve filtered that against trying to live each day as fully as I know how too.
And I am far from doing that super well each day. Old ways die hard, I guess. I still get caught up in the future tense a lot. Goals are inevitably future focused. I’ve wanted to speak Spanish well for a long time. I’ve downloaded the apps and have had varying degrees of success with sticking to a studying regime. If I ever want to really speak and understand the language though, I need to dedicate time each day over a long enough time and eventually, I’ll achieve the goal.
The reason why I still struggle to say much of anything other than asking where the restroom is in Spanish is not because the goal is wrong or that my desire to learn isn’t strong enough. It’s because I haven’t made it into a disciplined practice each day. I hope you all will hold me accountable to do better moving forward with this goal, but therein lies the difference between living each day or living in the future tense; always looking to the next achievement to get our kick of positive neurotransmitters.
Have you ever written a bucket list for yourself—things to do or experience before we die? I think spending time thinking about what experiences we hope to have in life is wonderful. Goodness knows, if we don’t even articulate what we want, we are very unlikely to ever stumble upon the desired outcome. At the same time, though, I don’t see very many bucket lists that include things like “be kind to everyone I meet,” or “spend more time listening,” or “give friends my full attention when I’m talking with them.” These sorts of things aren’t the kind of aspirations that make into great bucket lists, but they can certainly be wonderful to set as daily aspirations. And when I reach my death bed, I think it’ll be more who I have become that’ll matter most, not what I have done or where I have been.
Again, this is not a mutually exclusive sort of thing. We can learn so much about people that can be life changing by traveling and experiencing other cultures. Accomplishing lifelong goals can be thrilling and it can teach us so much about ourselves and can set us up in better ways to assist others. I just know that for me, it’s important that I keep a healthy balance between those goals and the kind of daily reminders about who I really want to be today.
Perhaps beneath all of this, the part that I feel has been missing for me in the Happiness of Pursuit as well as in the way I used to look at goal setting, is that life throws serious curve balls at us sometimes. Debilitating illnesses happen when they are least expected and are never convenient. Relationships break down. Incomes come and go. Even our own abilities can change in an instant. I am painfully aware of that fact, having been a rising star pitcher in little league to not being able to use my throwing hand at all. We shouldn’t necessarily give up dreams when serious setbacks hit us, but my old goal of becoming a brain surgeon is no longer a possibility. If we have a strong enough sense of who we are and what we value, we can navigate to rewarding aspirations even if some of those goals unfortunately need to change their shape and focus.