Goals - Do You Really Need One?

Each one of us must have given some thought to this at some point in our life. Some may have had goals, some may have not had any and some wouldn't have bothered to give it a thought at all. I didn't have a goal when I passed out of college. All I knew was I had to work to earn money. I gave it a thought quite late in my life when I had spent almost half of my life working in sales and was seriously contemplating to pursue my passion for arts and take it up as a full time profession.

I used to watch every morning people fresh from their morning bath wearing their neatly ironed clothes and marching along on their way to work. As I watched them I used to think about what drives them to get up every morning and go to work? (Besides the fact that they have to feed their families and earn a living) did each one of these people have a goal in their life? What do you mean by goal? Is it necessary to have a goal what if one does not have a goal?

A whole lot of questions were floating in my mind. What is a goal? According to the dictionary: 

1) Something  that you hope to achieve.

2) The purpose toward which an endeavor is directed.
3) The object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result:

Each Individual is different and unique in his own way. Like the saying one size doesn't fit all. Likewise there is no universal solution or rule. Each one is different and so are their needs and solutions.

There are different perspectives of looking at goals. Some are of the opinion that, if you have a goal you are so focused on it that you end up losing a lot of good opportunities that pass you by without you having noticed it. There is also a disappointment when you do not achieve your goal.

There are some others that live life each day as it comes and have very specific short term goals that are achievable. The last category is those that do not have any goal in their life.

Most people do not realize that every day from the time we get up to the time when we go to bed we end up making goals and achieving some of them, but they are so small that we do not want to term them as goals.

What do you think of goals? My own experiences during my transition phase led me to doing a series of paintings on them. You can take a look at them by visiting my gallery page here.

Do let me know what you think about goals in the comments below. I will end this post with this talk by Tony Robbins who is a TED speaker and who talks about - Why we do what we do. There is a bit of profanity in the language he uses but if you can ignore that and without being judgemental of the speaker, If you can try to take the positives from this talk you will find this talk inspiring and make you focus on the why which is essential.

It doesn't matter whether you have a goal or not what matters is why you do a certain thing. I hope this post will make you ponder on goals and on why you do what you do. Take care everyone and have a great day.