When we obsess over our goals, we can easily sacrifice what makes those goals meaningful in the first place.
– The Surprising Science of Goal Setting (And Why You’re Probably Doing It Wrong)
It’s a good article, like a lot of Mark Manson’s work. Particularly whether our goals are aligned with our values.
That, of course, presupposes that we’re aware of our values in the first place. That’s a whole other exercise, and uses a different part of the brain than goal-setting does.
We don’t usually think about or acknowledge our values to ourselves. I think that’s because by the time we establish our own independent lives, we’ve already made several commitments: a degree, a city, a job, a house (often relative to the job), loans, maybe a spouse. Each of those comes with its constraints – in the case of the spouse, their own (often tacit) values.
I think we implicitly grok that our values, even if unacknowledged to our own selves, are already in conflict with many, most, of these commitments. That’s why our goals are, from day one, typically misaligned with our values.
Most of our twenties and some of our thirties are about realising this. The rest of our thirties and forties are us fashioning an ersatz compromise between who we are and who we really are. And that’s probably why people really only begin to chill after that.
Spending over half our lives in this muddle is both uniquely human and inhuman. Those of us lucky enough to have youth before us than behind should have an honest conversation with ourselves. Having subsequent conversations with those close to us won’t be easy, but it’ll be inevitable.
The payoff, then, is having a set of goals that we viscerally believe in. It is indescribably freeing – a feeling too many of us haven’t yet felt.