Around December or January of every year, I notice many people talking about the goals¹ they wish to accomplish for the coming year or the goals they wanted to accomplish for the ending year. Many people set goals that are good for their health, like losing weight, or exercising to remain slim. Many other people set financial goals, like earning money, earning more money, or paying off debt. Still, many other people have different kinds of goals that they try to coordinate around the concept of a 365-days goal period.

One thing I would like to propose to you is to start thinking of setting up goals, instead of planning to set up achievable goals. Your goals can be sorted out in ways other than the achievable and non-achievable category. You can look at a goal and think “Can this goal be pursued easily using the exact tools, resources and character that I have at my disposal at this very moment?” That way, goals which can be achieved easily can also exist along side the goals which cannot be achieved easily. Thus, your goals will exist based on what you want your goals to be and the difficulty level of their completion or progress, instead of your goals existing based on whether or not you think they can be achieved.

5 reasons setting achievable goals is a bad stereotypical trend

In my view, setting achievable goals does not seem like a good concept. Following are five of the several different reasons due to which setting achievable goals can be bad.

1. You limit yourself before you start.

   People who think of what they cannot do in their entire life usually look for smaller things they can do to feel better. If you want to simply feel better by faking levels of accomplishments by limiting your boundaries, go ahead. If you think your life should improve or you want to keep on improving the satisfaction of your life, you have to increase some thing, like effort or your targets or even your thinking, in order to expect or get more. Since you set goals usually to achieve something, setting limited goals means you want to achieve something that is easy and limited. Even the simple concept of thinking more about thoughts themselves or something helps.

2. You avoid obstacles.

   Have you ever come across the saying “Look for challenges.” Well, people who look for challenges in life simply because they want to face challenges worry me because such people are very weak: they usually simply want to prove to themselves or others that they are better. How about achieving something through a challenge? I am not sure if “The Challenge Facer” is a goal some people are out to achieve: maybe they are. Similarly, people who keep avoiding obstacles and living a life without obstacles usually end up not doing much.

   Focus on what you want. If there are challenges along the path of what you want, then facing those challenges is more logical, reasonable and ethical than simply going around saying “I’m a challenging person. I look for challenges.” Of course, once you are aiming for something, then you can look for challenges or try your best to avoid them. Now you should realize that your goal itself may be to face challenges in life for some reasons only known you². If such a goal exists, then sure, you can go ahead and look forward to such challenges in my view.

3. Life will not improve for you.

   How can life improve when you only set out to do things which are easily doable based on your existing life? If you want to change life, you have to do things differently to achieve a different result than what you are experiencing at the moment. How can a goal, which requires no change in the essential elements or views in your life, result in your life changing due to that goal?

4. Achievable goals are an excuse to simply have goals.

   Usually, it seems, many achievable goals exist simply because one wants to feel better by having any goal in their mind. Thus, you make plans on what to do in a year simply because making such a plan makes you feel that you are doing something good³. Sure, such a feeling is important also, but you can try to convert those feelings into other things also to see if the new results help you even more.

5. Stereotypical tradition of setting goals will continue.

   This reason usually happens because we see many others around us planning their upcoming year or analyzing their previous years to see what goals they can achieve or have achieved. If you set out to do something about your goal planning simply because people around you set their yearly goals, you may be simply making goal plans in order to fit into the society. You already know where I stand when it comes to doing things simply because the society does and loves them, right?⁴

Set goals regardless of their achievable status

Now you should realize that the very idea, of setting up goals that are easy to achieve or are simply achievable since the beginning, being bad also means that any goals you set are theoretically achievable. Thus, when you set goals, do not think about their achievable status or their achievable future. Think of the process and the actual goal. The more dreamy the goal, the more important it probably should or may be for you, even if that dreamy important goal is one of the dozens of other goals in your mind.

As time passes, you will realize that some goals are being achieved, some goals are failing miserably, while other goals have surpassed your expectations, have slowed down, or something else. That is normal, and that is how life is utilized to achieve something.

What do you think?

Please let me know what you think about the idea of simply having goals instead of achievable goals, or if you have any questions or comments or anything to share, like your own goals from the past or why you had them. Please let me know if the above thought or theory can be a universal law, or if there are exceptions where the above listed traits or other traits of achievable goals can do more good than this thought of mine, or if the idea above can be modified to be more accommodating.

When we have goals, we can work on achieving them. If we fail, we will learn and that feeling and experience becomes part of us, enabling us to hopefully try new and different ways of achieving other goals in the future. Say no to setting goals that are easily achievable on purpose. Focus on setting goals based on what you want your goals to be.

Thank you for reading.

1. No, not soccer goals. Soccer goals and saving soccer goals help you in different ways, like making you stop the goal and start the pain. [↩]
2. ”The Challenge Facer!!“ [↩]
3. I myself have talked about goals planning before, but I have also noticed that I have rarely, or ever, explicitly expressed the details of my yearly plans in public. There is a reason for that: I do not end up having goals based on a year. Instead, I have goals for life, both short term to long term, which keep changing or modifying or updating dynamically every moment of the day, or whenever I think about them or whenever I do something about them, when it comes to realizing as to how or what can be done for me to change to get that goal or to get similar results as the goal in mind. My goals rarely change in terms of being eliminated - a few new goals keep getting added from time to time, while many goals have been with me since childhood. Without goals or efforts towards goals, which are in my view the desire and the actual action to experience an idea or a concept or a dream, life can be very robotic or extremely unsatisfying for me. [↩]
4. I stand against the idea of doing something because the society does it. Think emotionally, think rationally, think from scratch, and decide what you want to do: that is what I tell myself all the time. [↩]