What if the whole point of setting goals wasn’t to reach them?
—
There’s a common misconception about what makes people more than average.
It takes failure to succeed.
Many people believe that success comes without failure. This simply isn’t true. The reality is that the average person fails less over their lifetime than the successful person does. Your willingness to fail should match your desire to overcome.
Your desire to overcome is fueled by big goals.
Are your goals large enough?
Nobody is truly self-made.
However, my father is as close as someone can get to being a self-made man. Before he finished high school, he had moved out of his parents’ house and into his boss’s attic. He’d bag groceries every day after school.
At sixteen, he began riding around with the local sheriff’s department. He grew into the badge and became a dispatcher. He says that’s the reason he’s so good with maps.
After a kid and a divorce, he took night shifts at a hospital to pay his way through college.
After two more kids–including me–his law firm finally took off. My work ethic pales compared to his, and my horsepower looks like a miniature pony compared to his clydesdale.
Here’s what he told me about goals.
I went to his office while on break from college. “Dad,” I said, “Can I share my goals with you?”
“Sure,” he said.
You know, son, a million isn’t what it used to be.
|
He continued typing on his computer as I took a seat in the red chair at his desk. So I began. He nodded at every bullet point I covered, but only to acknowledge them. Not necessarily in approval.
“And my final goal, dad, is to have a net worth of one million dollars by the time I’m 35.”
He stopped typing.
“You know, son, a million isn’t what it used to be.” He swung around in his chair to face me, leaned back, and smiled.
“Go for ten.”
When we aim low, we’ll miss lower.
When it comes to personal goals, we’re told to make them attainable. We’re told that setting goals that are too big will demotivate us or make us feel as if we failed if we don’t achieve them.
Perhaps I’m strange, but playing that way is playing too safely for me.
My dad apparently thinks so too.
The 10x mentality.
Whenever I share the story of my dad’s response to my goals, there’s usually one person who thinks, “Damn, greedy bastard!”
But that’s not my dad, and my dad wasn’t only telling me to amass a $10 million net worth.
The message he sent me that day was masked by the words he spoke. When he told me to go for ten, he was really telling me that none of my goals were big enough. He was really telling me that my attainable goals were hiding my fear of failure. I was hedging against the hurt I’d feel if I failed to reach a bigger goal.
What he was really telling me was that goals aren’t necessarily meant to be reached.
Instead, they’re meant to be reached for.
Photo: Flickr/John Liu
No truer words! Simple! Brilliant! Beautiful! Thank you for sharing!