3317: [Part 1] How to Set Goals You Will Actually Achieve by Steve Pavlina on Personal Growth & Development

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This is Optimal Living Daily. How to set goals you will actually achieve. Part 1 by Steve Pavlina of StevePavlina.com. And I'm Justin Malik.

Happy Middle of the Week Wednesday, and welcome to one of the only podcasts in the world where blogs are narrated to you for free, a little bit of positivity every day, which adds up after time. And sometimes I read in the longer post that I split up into two days. That's the case today. I'll read the first half and then finish the rest tomorrow.

So that was Get Right to Part 1 and start optimizing your life. How to set goals you will actually achieve. Part 1 by Steve Pavlina of StevePavlina.com. A major obstacle that prevents people from enjoyably achieving their goals is that they set their goals incorrectly to begin with.

This problem occurs because people don't understand the nature of time well enough. When people consider a particular goal, they often worry about the time commitment. Well, if I start my own business now, it could take years to make it profitable. I'm so overweight it could take years for me to get in shape.

If I break off this unfulfilling relationship, it could take years to get back on my feet again. Such thoughts are clearly demotivating, but more importantly, they reveal a total misunderstanding of the nature of time. We value our time, so we have a natural tendency to be expedient, and we also want to enjoy the present moment. Consequently, we're disinclined to set goals that will take a very long time to achieve.

Who wants to to toil for years in order to reach a potentially better someday? Most of us simply don't have the discipline to do that, even if there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Discipline is not the real issue, however. The issue is a misunderstanding of time, we tend to think of time as a resource that we spend, just like we spend money.

To complete a one hour task is to spend an hour on it. How are you spending your day? Where do you want to spend your next vacation? How will you spend the rest of the year?

Time is money, a disposable resource. This is a silly and inaccurate way to think about time, however, time is not a resource. You cannot spend time, time spends itself. You have no choice in the matter.

No matter what you do, the time is going to pass anyway. Doesn't matter if you do one thing or another for the next five years, those five years will pass, no matter what you do. In reality, if you're never in the past or future, you exist only in the present moment. Even when you remember the past or envision the future, you're still thinking those thoughts in the present.

All you really have is right now, and that's all you ever will have. You can't control the passage of time, but you can control your present moment to focus. That's all, no past, no future, just right now. So the only thing that exists is the present moment then what sense does it make to talk about long-term goals?

How do you actually achieve anything? Well, first understand that you can only achieve anything in the present moment and you can only enjoy those achievements in the present moment. You can't achieve anything or enjoy anything in the past or future because you're never there. That's obvious, isn't it?

But too often people act incongruently with this fact. It's very difficult to achieve a goal that's based on an inaccurate model of reality. Such a goal will surely be an uphill struggle. The purpose of goal setting isn't to control the future.

That'd be senseless because the future only exists in your imagination. The only value in goal setting is that it improves the quality of your present moment to reality. Setting goals can give you a greater clarity and focus right now. Whenever you set a goal, always ask yourself, how does setting this goal improve my present reality?

If a goal does not improve your present reality, then the goal is pointless and you may as well dump it. But if the goal brings greater clarity, focus, and motivation to your life whenever you think about it, it's a keeper. Many people set goals and then assume the path to reach the goal will require suffering and sacrifice or recipe for failure. A better idea is to set a goal and pay attention to the effect it has on your present reality.

Set goals that yield a positive effect on your life whenever you think about them long before the final outcome is actually achieved. Treat goal setting as a way to enhance your present reality, not as a way to control the future. But suppose you set a goal to start your own business. You imagine some future point where you're enjoying being your own boss, doing what you love, and making a great income.

There's nothing wrong with that. Then you think about how much work it will be, the risks you'll face, and other discouraging thoughts. You've left the present and are dwelling in the future, which is only an illusion. Bring yourself back to the present and realize that none of those things have happened.

You're just making them up. How silly it is to make up things you don't even want, and your imagination isn't accurate anyway. Now try this. Here's that on tomorrow's episode.

You just listened to part one of the post titled, How to Set Goals You Will Actually Achieve by Steve Pavlina of Steve Pavlina.com, and I'll be right back with my commentary. Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news.

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They get to Steve, definitely not what I was expecting. I thought he might start talking about smart goals when I first read the article, but it was nice to see a different take. At first, I was a bit skeptical. It was like he was saying, well, if the goal doesn't benefit you right now in this particular moment, it's not worth doing at all.

So my mind went to something like saving money, for example. I could argue that spending money right now might benefit me, but on the other hand, saving more is something only my future self will think before, right? He said, treat goal setting as a way to enhance your present reality, not as a way to control the future. It can feel a bit contradicting.

But if we go a bit deeper and think about how saving might actually make us feel in the moment, maybe feel hopeful or proud, maybe safer, protected, then I think it still does align with what Steve's saying. So we have to be careful about how we interpret this, because if we think about it too quickly, the meaning might get lost. That's a little preview of what we're gonna hear tomorrow when we finish up this post. But I'll leave it there for today.

Thank you for being here, listening every day, and I'll be back tomorrow to finish up this post, where you're optimal life. Oh, wait. Oh, wait. Oh.