Chances are you've heard of how to create SMART goals, right?
According to George Doran's helpful advice, we should make our goals SMART
where SMART is an acronym standing for Specific, Measurable,
Assignable, to a particular person who will be responsible for
them, Realistic and Time-Related, having a specific deadline.
This is no doubt great advice for creating strategic plans or
even choosing the tactical steps for achieving those plans.
But it's not as obviously helpful when choosing our life goals.
These broad goals have more to do with the purpose of our lives and with the overall
mission that strategic plans and tactical steps can help us move toward.
Without having at least some idea of our life goals,
it can be tough to decide on the strategies and tactics for achieving them.
It can be hard to know what direction to give to our efforts.
So how should we go about choosing our life goals?
In the past, society has laid out fairly clear pathways to success in the workplace
by presenting specific professional and career trajectories.
And parents often had a huge influence on which of those pathways
their children chose.
To varying degrees this is still the case today, but many of us find ourselves in
worlds with increasing amounts of freedom and multiplying opportunities.
And at the same time parents seem less likely to tell us to be a doctor or
a lawyer and more likely to tell us to follow our passion and
do something we love.