Goal

[clevermanka]

I feel like I don't have goals. Because when I want to do something, I just go do it. I don't classify it or think of it as A Goal. I just start doing whatever it is.

Learn a new art technique. Check.

Take another dance class. Check.

Grow out my hair. Check.

Are these goals? They don't feel like goals. I just decide "Hey I should do this" and then I do it. There's not much planning involved. I've always thought of goals as larger things. Write a novel. Publish a novel. Be successfully self-employed. Go to graduate school. Raise children. Be famous. None of which I have ever wanted to do, by the way. I just want to be free to be happy and content with my life. Which, left to my own devices, I'm pretty good at doing.

Is it a goal if I'm already doing it?

I feel like I don't have Life Goals. I'm usually okay with that. Except at the workshop this weekend it was a huge obstacle, and very frustrating. A major part of several journal entries was to focus on goals. And...um, Drinking More and Wearing More Jewelry didn't really fit the point of the exercises.

mckitterick tells me that I have goals, but when I look at his goals (having a positive effect on humanity, creating something that will change the way people think, saving the world, etc. etc. etc.) anything I actually feel like doing...well, it doesn't really fit under the same umbrella, you know?

I don't need to compare myself to other people to define myself, and I certainly don't set my standards or sense of self by other people's definitions, and obviously my goals are not going to be everybody else's goals, but I'm coming to the realization that I don't even understand the idea of goals. Here's what should be a really simple word/concept and I haven't the foggiest how to deal with it.

So, I guess Goal #1: Figure out what is a goal?

Comments

[poincaraux.livejournal.com]

Ha! Genius would be nice. Maybe I should write more papers when I'm sleep deprived :).

I'm not feeling very articulate at the moment, but this:

"""I think this is a huge part of my difficulty with the term, yes. See my comment to [info]acommonreader[/info], above. She pretty much pinpoints my issue. For most of my life I've been fine with vague, internal motivations and I haven't felt the need to assign them definitions or visible/audible shape. I don't really feel a need to change that since the system has worked fine for me so far."""

reminds me very much of an article I was just reading about parenting[*]. One of the main punchlines was that you should be specific with praise. You shouldn't tell a kid "oh, wow, you're so smart" because that tends to just make kids lazy. Being smart, in and of itself, isn't really very interesting or useful.

But people are smart in all sorts of different ways. I never had to work very hard at anything academic throughout high school (and 90% of college .. English, for instance, made me work quite hard). Because of what I wanted to do, at some point I had to teach myself to explicitly work hard on that kind of thing. Teaching yourself to work hard on something that's always been easy is not so easy.

It sounds like you were built with lots of smarts in the whatever-includes-goals department and you've never had to really work on/think about/study it. That's certainly fine, up until the point that you decide you *do* want to work on/think about/study it, at which point, it's probably guaranteed to feel unnatural for a while.

[*]There is an unbelievable amount of total crap written about the subject. By "unbelievable" I mean that, yes, even you would be surprised at the sheer volume and audacity of it. This particular article was based on some decent scientific studies. Well, as much as such a thing can be.

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you were built with lots of smarts in the whatever-includes-goals department and you've never had to really work on/think about/study it. That's certainly fine, up until the point that you decide you *do* want to work on/think about/study it, at which point, it's probably guaranteed to feel unnatural for a while.

I believe you're correct about my having an innate capability in the whatever-includes-goals department. Which is kind of nice, because goodness knows I'm lacking smarts in several other areas.

I think I do want to spend some more time pondering this goal issue, even though it does feel quite unnatural. It's good for me, right? As my mother would say "It'll build character."