Setting Goals

This is the first portion of a lecture I delivered on goals and habits. 

Time is precious. Your time is marked when you’re young by holidays, usually Christmas or birthdays. As you grow older, those markers become more closely aligned, because you have more years behind you. As you grow, your memories collapse together. The question is, what will you do with your time?

Time is a gift, just as any other type of wealth. Every person is allotted 24 hours in a day, 365 ¼ days a year. Why do some people accomplish more than others? Because of the way they use time. If you are lazy, you will not accomplish as much. On the other hand, others follow the tyranny of the urgent, only doing the things that are in front of them, rather than investing your time beforehand. Don be that person either. We are called to invest, to be good stewards of our time. This doesn’t mean we only work all day, every day. It means we plan beforehand for how we will spend our time. ‘

One of the saddest things to hear is someone who is older who regrets wasting their time on their daily job, their bad habits, or selfish behavior. It is not possible to have everything you want; scarcity is still with us. But God has given you gifts, abilities, wealth, and time to use those things.

Your life is not your own. Throughout your life there will be stops, starts, energy, and lack thereof. Yet in everything, God controls your life. You belong to Him and He calls you to use your gifts to honor Him.

The direction of your life is largely in front of you. You have a multitude of options available, based on your gifts or skills. The choices you make in the next several years will determine the path you follow, the person you marry, and the eulogy that will read about you at your funeral. 

We will talk about those choices soon, but this week we must consider the first objective: setting goals and building habits. A goal is not just a task, but a building-block to the type of person you want to become. Years ago, when our family moved out to Idaho, the trip took 36 hours of driving, not including stops. Our final destination was Lewiston, Idaho, but there had to be planning beforehand. I planned four stops along the way. We would stay there each night and go the next morning. I realized my planning was not thorough enough because one of the stops, Denver, CO, unbeknownst to me, had three major events going on and every hotel within a 1-hour radius of the city was booked. We ended up driving until almost 1:30 in the morning and staying 1 and ½ hours further north.

You should have one or two final goals, the things you want to do with your life, which will probably resemble the final goal of others. But the stops along the way will be different for each of you, based on where you are. The stops along the way are your goals now. I thought Lewiston might be a long-term place for us to live, but it turned out that we only lived there two years. Then we repeated the trip back, although to a different place in Alabama. Your life will change and you will have to adapt at times, but your goals are still attainable.

Why set goals? They require you to set a destination. You’ve probably hear the saying, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” That is true. There must be something you want to achieve.

They must be goals that motivate you. You won’t pursue them if they don’t. It will probably be something that you appreciate or want to become.

They should be SMART (https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_90.htm).

Specific – they must be clear, not vague. For example, when we traveled instead of saying, “Denver, CO,” I should have said, “The Holiday Inn Express at 123 Johnson Street in Denver.”

Measurable – you must know how you can determine whether or not you met the goal.

Attainable – if it is not within your reach in the time you set, you will get discouraged and be more tempted to quit.

Relevant – they should be in the service of the general direction you want to go. If we were travelling from Alabama to Idaho, we shouldn’t set a goal of stopping in Maine. It’s not relevant to our main goal.

Time Bound – there should be a specific time you plan on achieving your goal. If not, you will flounder. We planned on driving approximately 9-10 hours each day on our trip west. Establishing a time (create a website in 6 months) puts you under the gun.

Finally, they must have an action plan, a method of putting the steps towards achieving that goal into practice. In our traveling case, the action plan were the roads we’ve travel to get where we wanted to be at the end of each day.