I was thinking about this question after reading an article in a magazine about setting goals. The article had four steps for setting goals, and six steps for meeting them. Included were your usual tips for visualizing your goal, writing it down, and making a plan of action to meet the goal.
The article made a good point to imagine how meeting the goal will make you feel. Will it make you happier? The article then went into a discourse on me... or rather dreamers. Those people who sit around dreaming about meeting goals, but not doing anything about it.
So that got me thinking. I’m very good at thinking about what I would do if I ever won the lottery. But what would I REALLY do? I can’t constantly travel, backpack, mountain bike, party, play soccer for the rest of my life (but I’m sure I could make a good faith effort).
Here are the things that came to mind:
- Go on outdoor adventures and backpacking trips
- Buy a nice house
- Travel big time
- Buy a really nice car
- Get in shape via a personal trainer
- Eat healthy with a cook/dietician
- Read a lot of books
- Work on open source projects and write lots of interesting code
- Learn to produce music on the computer
- Learn photography
- Live up to my name through Philanthropy
And the list goes on and on. The point of this excercise is to ask myself, if these are the things that would make me happy, what’s stopping me from doing them right now? The answer is that nothing is stopping me. I don’t need to wait to win the lottery (which will happen I tell you!). In fact, I’m already doing all these things to one degree or another.