Goals and Happiness

I’ve seen many books and articles about defining and achieving goals, but few discuss how using goals affects your happiness. Goals have a big impact on your  happiness, but for different reasons than you may think.

Goals May Be Unnecessary

My wife, Lisa, is happy and has no goals. Does that means she does nothing? Not at all. She leads a content, active life with work, family, and hobbies. She believes setting goals is a waste of time since she enjoys and appreciates things as they are. I admire her for this.

Citizens of some countries focus less on goals and more on the present. While in high school, my son, Ben, lived with a Costa Rican family for the summer. He reported that Costa Ricans are happier than Americans because they are

• More now-oriented and less goal-oriented
• More relationship-oriented
• Less consumer-oriented

Costa Ricans spend less time worrying about the future and more time enjoying the present. They spend time talking to family and friends and less time scheming on when they can buy a new, unnecessary, gadget. What a great way to live!

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a stress management expert, recently spoke in Philadelphia:

We are so absorbed with planning for the future…that we lose the lives we are living. We die a thousand deaths wasting our energy on…what will be.

If you’re a typical American, you’re taught by parents and teachers that you need goals to be successful and happy. This attitude is so ingrained you never question it, but do you really need goals?

A Healthy Attitude About Goals

Like me, you may like goals. You may be excited, passionate, and motivated by your goals. This is fine as long as you remain somewhat detached from your goals. This seems contradictory, but like many things in life you have to balance. Too little attachment and you won’t be motivated to complete your goals. Too much attachment and you can become blind and unhappy.

Attachment Makes You Blind

Steve Pavlina argues that you can become so attached to a goal that you’re blind to better opportunities. Steve tells an interesting personal story:

A few years ago, I was very focused on my games business with lots of clear goals…But I was too focused on goals like releasing new products and achieving a certain sales volume, and although they seemed like worthy goals at the time, they kept me stuck on my current path.  When I finally relaxed my goals and gave myself space to live goal-free for a while, I saw it was time for me to pull out of the gaming industry and start this personal development site.  And that’s exactly what I did.  But to pull it off, I had to terminate some goals which were very difficult to let go because I’d already invested so much into them.  Now with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear I made the right decision, but it wasn’t an easy decision at the time because I was too attached to my old goals.

However, I don’t think opportunity blindness is a problem with goal-setting itself but rather with goal-setting’s potential side-effect of lowering awareness.  Goals can help expand our awareness or contract it.  The key is getting those positive awareness-raising benefits without allowing the awareness-lowering effects to tag along.

Being slightly detached gives you valuable flexibility that can ultimately increase your awareness and happiness. It helps you see things as they are rather than as you want them to be.

Attachment Makes You Unhappy

If you’re so attached to your goal that you’ll only be happy if you complete it, you may be unhappy forever. What happens if you can’t complete your goal?

As you move through life, you might create a series of  goals like this:

• Graduate high school
• Graduate college
• Buy a car or house
• Marry or divorce
• Start a better job
• Retire

You finish one goal (graduate high school), but you’re still unhappy. You decide that you’ll be happy after you complete a new goal (graduate college). Sadly, this cycle can continue until until you’re near death and realize that you’ve always been unhappy because you couldn’t accomplish your infinite list of goals.

For years, I believed that I’d only be happy if I made $2 million dollars before I turned 30. I worked obsessively and my personal relationships suffered. My wife became a stranger. We’d go on vacation together and I’d work during most of the vacation. I stopped exercising and doing other hobbies that I enjoyed. I had no balance or perspective.

Fortunately, I failed. If I had succeeded, I’m certain that after making $2 million I would have decided I’d be unhappy until I made $4 million…and then $8 million…and so on. The cycle was broken when our sons were born and I eventually realized I was happy without $2 million. I still have goals that excite me, but I’m happy regardless of whether I complete them.

The Best Goals

The best goals are goals that help others. I write this not because I believe that you must be altruistic, but because accomplishing goals that help others will make you happier. It’s in your own self-interest. When your goals help others, you increase your feelings of connection to those you help and decrease your own self-absorption. This combination of a greater connection and shrinking ego helps you become more integrated into the world and, as a result, happier. (More on this in a future post.)

Below are some examples of better (for happiness) goals.

• Support a charity that helps others
• Help a child learn to ride a bike
• Search for a cure to a disease
• Be kinder to your significant other
• Invent a cheaper form of energy

As you can see, your goals can help any number of people. It doesn’t matter.

Warning: You must be honest with yourself about your true motivation. You’ll be unhappy if you have the right goal for the wrong reason. I was convinced the motivation for my $2 million goal was to provide financial security for my family. I eventually realized I was doing it for my own ego gratification.

Try This

Please try the exercises below to better understand how your goals impact your happiness.

1. Ignore your goals for a week or a month. What happens?
2. Make a list of your goals and evaluate how useful they are to your happiness. Is each goal driving you or are you driving each goal? Are you obsessed?
3. Ask a close friend what he thinks the real motivation is behind your various goals. Are you deluding yourself?

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Tags: Habits, Happiness, Personal goals, Psychology