My biggest security blanket in life is having a big, hairy, audacious goal. Something I can focus on wholeheartedly, at the near exclusion of everything else, and charge at, full-steam-ahead. I love the clarity and purpose it gives me, I love the way it forcibly prioritizes everything from my thoughts to my daily routine, and I absolutely love the way it grants me an excuse to avoid dealing with boring, mundane things that I like to avoid -- after all, who has time for laundry on a Grail Quest?
The problem usually arises, however, not in the chase but in the catch. Like the proverbial dog that catches the car, attaining my goals is almost never as satisfying as I imagined during the chase.
I get extremely attached to the fantasy of an idea, and then almost always find the reality to be a letdown. In the past, I would "solve" this by simply refocusing on a new goal. Stay busy. Find a new target. Keep moving. And if I didn't have one of my own, I'd find a scrappy, ambitious entrepreneur somewhere who had one I could adopt, and help him chase his. (The tech sector is never, ever short of these!)
It made for a great career... and a massively lopsided life.
So now I have a new rule for myself: 90-days only. I don't take on anything that requires more than a three-month commitment, and I force myself to re-visit the goals every day to make sure they still feel worth perusing.
One of my earliest mentors and most trusted friends once told me (as he was told by one of his earliest mentors): every good person is entitled to change their mind.
The problem with being preoccupied with huge, all-consuming goals is that we don't leave ourselves the option to re-evaluate and potentially change our minds. And by granting myself this luxury, I have made massive and unpredictable changes in my life already in 2019, ones that I never would have made if I'd been focused on a big prize.
It makes me wonder what other amazing things I passed by over the years without even realizing it, simply because I was too distracted with a goal to pay attention to my surroundings.
So, what goal have you latched onto that might be due for a little reconsideration?
