You Can Reach All Your Goals and Still be in the Same Place
There is one thing worse than having no goals. It’s to reach all your goals and still be in the same place you would have been if you had no goals. These types of goals are what I call directionless goals.
To understand the tragedy of a directionless goal think about how you would chop down an oak tree if your only choice was to use an axe. If you chop at that oak tree a thousand times in a thousand different places how much progress would you make? Zero.
You would be in the same place you were when you started, except the oak tree would just be all scarred up. Each one of those thousand chops represent a goal and achieving each one of those goals does very little to help you make progress. However, the work to achieve those goals does leave a permanent scar. That permanent scar represents a loss of your most valuable asset, time.
On the other hand, if you chop at that oak tree a thousand times in the same spot that process would lead to a completely different level of progress. If that tree didn’t come crashing down, you would at least visibly see that it was well on its way to falling.
The next time you sit down to think about your goals, I urge you to reflect on this oak tree metaphor. Don’t confuse hard work with progress. The two are not one in the same.