Goals in life

An interesting article caught my attention as I was reading this morning. The article talks about goals, setting goals and achieving them. It makes me ponder whether I've been doing the right thing.

All my life, I've been brought up to think that to be successful in life, I'm supposed to set goals, mostly realistic enough and achieve them or at least try to achieve most of them. But today's article open my mind further. It sorts of contradicts what I've been traditionally taught.

This was a topic brought up by an author called Stephen Shapiro whose book is called Goal-Free Living. In this article, the Stephen Shapiro is quoted to ask us to throw our to-do-list out the window. At first, I thought, why in the world would I do that. But reading further on, it makes sense, some of it.

First, Stephan Shapiro asked a good question, "Whose goal is it anyway?" He says, most goals aren't created by people themselves but is driven by society and family pressure. True enough but that's what we have in this world right? Society and family do play a part in our lives. So of course, our goals tend to evolve around them.

Secondly, he again said that when we're focusing on our goals, we're putting blinders on. Now this one I agree maybe 80%. I quote from the article written by Dawn Raffel, "You lose peripheral vision and miss out on all the breath opportunities around you" Yes, we lose some, we win some. When we put our effort in achieving that one goal, we lose sight on other things that might be equally important for example, that career we're banking on, while we totally neglect our other half or family. Can't be greedy right? What about multi-tasking? Can't you apply that to achieving goals as well? I don't know. You tell me. But it does makes sense to a certain extent I guess.

Third, Stephen Shapiro says that with busy achieving goals, we're always living for the future and people end up saying I'll be happy when (fill in the blanks). Ok. This one I agree. This is almost equivalent to being greedy in a way. Questions? I'm presuming that what he means is, we forget to live in the now and always want something further, something more, as in I want this or I must be at this level so that I'll be happy. But when we get it are we happy? Or do we want more?

We can't live without goals, nor can we live with having too many goals can we. Or can't we?
Moderation is the word here in my understanding while Shapiro says, to have the right goals, you must be able to relate to them the right way.

So what goals do you have for the now and the future?