Goal-setting should include a happy life

David W. Kuhns Sr./Northwest Guardian

We live in a society that makes a mania about planning and goal-setting. Maybe that’s why so many people are unhappy.

We would do far better if we paid more attention to the details and let the big picture take care of itself.

I can hear all the planners out there shaking their heads in disgust. “You have to have a plan if you are to have reliable success,” they say.

Well, they’ll get no argument from me when it comes to organizations. On the personal level, though, I turn aside from that mainstream school of thought.

Setting long-term goals sounds like a good idea. But those goals are rarely aimed at things that really bring happiness. They seem to center around the trappings of success — ranks to achieve, honors to be earned, money to be made — rather than the essentials of a happy life.

Goals inevitably become ways to measure success or failure, too — more often than not the latter is what people find. You can’t plan for happiness and contentment. Those are qualities you experience in the present.

People have too many regrets in life. They express those regrets in the ways they treat others and the ways they treat themselves. Anger, frustration, depression and finger pointing — those are the real results many achieve as they strive for their self-imposed measures of success. They lay down wonderful-sounding goals for where they want to go, and never understand that life is all about the journey, not the destination.

That doesn’t mean you should make no decisions; it doesn’t mean you don’t look ahead. But how you live right now has far more to do with being successful than making grand plans about where you want to be in the distant future.

For most people, a good view of the present is the biggest hurdle they face in getting to the future.

I did the goal-setting thing for a long while, then something great happened — instead of striving for those lofty goals, I developed some wisdom. And I have had greater satisfaction ever since.

Here is my prescription for success: Live the best you can, right now.

When I enlisted in the Army, I had some long-range goals. I wanted to go to OCS, to lead Soldiers in combat and be a general officer. But I never followed up on the OCS thing, never heard a shot fired in anger and retired as a sergeant major.

Measured against my goals, I was a complete failure. But you know what? I am the happiest guy I know. I look back on a rewarding career. I have a wonderful wife and a great son. I look forward to every day at work.

I take part in organizational planning — but my goals are pretty short term — I strive to do the best I can today.

It is kind of a Zen thing, I suppose, this living for the moment, but it works. There is logic there, too.

If you try to do the right thing every moment, isn’t that the best way to be in the right place down the road? If you make a good choice now, doesn’t that move you toward a better place in the future? If I try to be the best person I can today — every day — won’t that make me a better person 10 years from now?

Living in the moment is not easy. It doesn’t mean doing what feels good; it means doing what you know is right — all the time.

In many respects, those long-range goal-setters are taking the easy way out. If your goals are years away, or even months, it is easy to take side steps away from the chosen path — “I can put it off, today; I have lots of time to catch up.” You may end up with a longer list of accomplishments, but what do you have to show for them? A high proportion of the “successful” folks I know are failures where it really counts. They have sacrificed family for career, thrown aside values in an effort to “win,” and ended up achieving their goals only to wonder what they all mean.

Lower your sights, folks. You are more likely to hit the real target.

A very smart general I once worked for used to say that if you weren’t having fun most of the time, you were doing something seriously wrong.

String together a long line of happy moments and you end up with a happy, productive life — and that ought to be the goal for all of us.