INTRODUCTION
My father once told me, “The biggest and most important events that affect our lives are the ones we have no control over”. I also took time to think of our birth, death and thing that happens in between.
We think we have a choice, we think we make a conscious effort to choose a career, a friend, a life partner, even what to wear. We think we have the power to choose but all these choices would have changed if a tiny factor like location was changed, yeah I bet you that if you were just born in a different country…your friends, career, religious belief, or life partner would have not been the ones you have now.
We have a very tiny control of our lives but we don’t like to think that way. We love to think whatever we do is by a conscious decision based on facts and rational thinking. We don’t factor in the things we can’t control. We ignore the power of our environment and event happening around us.
I also thought of a careful and good driver who died in an accident because of the other drunk driver who crossed into his lane.
In the midst of all this uncertainty, we still want everything to go exactly as planned, we want the universe to give us exactly what we want. We have these New Year’s goals, monthly goals and money goals, we want them to happen the same way as we wrote them.
HOW WE SET GOALS
The most popular way to write goals as we have been told by our mentors is that we should write down goals by “assuming that we will not fail, money is no object and there is no any obstacle we will face.”
What is fundamentally wrong with that is that it is not realistic. You can’t write a goal or vision on top of a belief that there is an infinite supply of money and that you won’t fail.
We are placing goals assuming that we will never have bad days happening to us or our loved ones, we write yearlong goals not considering LIFE itself happening during the interim! What a joke
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OUR GOALS AND CONCEPT OF TIME
The other thing we are told to do is to put a deadline to our goals, because without it…it’s “just a wish”.
What we don’t know is humans have a very weird relationship with time. Since the old days, people did not know what time really is. So we came up with some sort of what I call witchcraft. Our relationship with time is no different from practising witchcraft.
Check this,
What is a day? A day is a time taken for the Earth to finish rotating in its own axis.
What is a year? A Year is a time taken for the Earth to revolve around the Sun
What is a month? A month is a time taken for the Moon to go around the Earth
What we are told to do is to fix our goal with time which means we must attach our goals to the rotations of the moon, sun and earth…this is pure Vodoo and juju.
You find someone who says “I must make 10 million before this year ends”
This means this guy must make 10million before the earth finishes revolving around the sun.
Now, what the fuck does the Earth revolving around the Sun have to do with you making money?
This is pure witchcraft.
So, the time we use right now is this thing somehow everyone agreed to, you got born and people taught you how to read the clock and that for you became time.
I don’t want to go to Einstein theory of relativity here. But from all these you can see that the goals we make are built on top of superficial things and those things will not work for everyone, this is where I say we should have goals that work.
HOW TO SET THESE GOALS
To do that, I believe we should only set actionable tasks. I am referring to Causality which means everything we see, hear, possess, experience and feel are outcomes of something happening which I call cause.
In other words, this is called Cause and Effect. For every effect, there must be a cause.
You are 100% in charge of the causes, not for the effects.
The best goal to set must be action based goals
You can measure them easily and you can alter them to fit your main target but you can never guarantee results because it is just so little we can control in this world…it’s just the way it is.
Examples
· Our goal used to be “I want to lose 10 kilograms of weight this year” but it will be “I will run 100 meters every Saturday for the whole year” (or put an action that helps lose weight)
· “I want to get a job in 3 months”, should be “Every weekday I will send my CV to 5 offices physically and 5 via email during the weekend as well as attending one corporate event a month online or physically to search for a job”
· “I want to make more money as a freelancer this year” should be “I will send 10 proposals to high ticket potential clients every day, learn sales, learn certain skills which are in demand and as well as run targeted sponsored social media ads”
Do you see where I am going with this?
Make actionable goals.
They are the simpler to keep track of and see progress
But get this, you might do everything you are supposed to do and the results you want might not come as you wanted.
This is my point.
Losing 10 Kilograms is not something you can do, that is a very complex biological process your body goes through. What if you get sick? Your body might process things slightly differently than other people, you have absolutely no control over it.
Making more money as a freelancer is out of your control because you need a stranger to pay you, and you won’t even know where the money will come from when you make the goal.
You might be the best in marketing and still not get that high ticket client.
What we are doing here is that we are increasing the probability of the desired goal to be achieved but we can never guarantee it.
More examples
· Some dude had a very nice business idea in Syria until the whole country went to war
· I personally had a good thing going on for 2019 but COVID happened and all my clients terminated their contracts indefinitely.
· Assume you are a musician and you set a goal to make 5 hit songs this year….you can’t do that because if you can really make 5 hit songs at will…why stop there to only 5? why not 100? A musician can make a goal to release 10 well-crafted songs and hope 5 of them will become a hit.
· Ask forex and crypto traders, you can’t force the market, but you can absolutely find the best entries, do risk management and handle your psychology which are the only things you should focus on to become profitable.
Get this in your head, that you can never guarantee any outcome but you can 100% surely increase the probability of that thing to happen and that should only be your focus.
BEST WAY TO VIEW TIME IN SETTING GOALS
Achieving your expected outcome might come later than the date you set and it’s okay because the entire concept of time is ridiculously based on the rotation of the Earth, Moon and the Sun which have absolutely nothing to do with you.
View time as a set of events which by the way is what we do naturally.
“I want to do pushups for 15 minutes”, can be changed to “I want to do 20 pushups until I finish them”
It’s the famous quote that “Be the first to get in the field and last to leave” so we hear about these super athletes like Messi and Ronaldo coming early to training and leaving late.
*We hear these best employees working overtime and always come early
*The religious people who can pray and meditate for hours without seeing time passing
*Software developers who can code all night and lose track of time
*Children losing track of time playing
*Daydreaming
*I wrote this article for 6 hours and I’m just realizing that the Sun is rising now
*Couples lose track of time when the romance is in the air
High performance and many successful people don’t have the sense of time that we have.
They have a relationship with time that works for them and their goals and not to please the mass.
*Warren Buffet sees 10 years like 1 month so he makes long term investment decisions.
*Elon Musk said he make 1-year goals and try to fit them into 3 months, not because he is a superhuman because his sense of time is different. It’s like Elon Musk’s 1 day equals our traditional 4 days. He has people doing day and night shifts, He has companies located in different time zones, which means they work around the clock and he cuts traditional bureaucracy, useless meetings and other things which hinders his employees to work efficiently.
When we do what we love, we lose the track of time
Time also doesn’t make sense when you are immersed in deep work, sometimes you will not even know what day it is.
We have all experienced this.
TIME VS EVENT
The concept of time we use is not natural. It’s actually made-up arbitrary bullshit if you ask me.
That is why not every yearly goal you set will happen in that year.
What we should pay attention to are events and actions.
Staying at work 10 hours is nothing compared to what actually you are doing at that time.
You can decide to work two hours a day if you can pay an employee to work for the rest of the work hours.
Nobody cares you woke up at 5:00 am in morning to beat the traffic they only care if you arrive to work on time.
EVENTS AND THEIR IMPACTS
The main focus is activities and accomplishments in that time duration you set to go your things.
The actions you take in that time should be having a great impact on reaching your goal
Only choose high-value actions that push you to the goal
*If you want muscles, don’t do push-ups ….LIFT THE GODDAMN WEIGHTS
*You want to make more money in forex, don’t waste more time finding more entries…use the same entries and increase lot sizes.
*You are losing money in crypto by learning through trial and error? Get a mentor
I mean spend more time sharpening your axe than spending cutting the tree
You need to make your actions and your events have the biggest impact on getting you to your goal.
CONCLUSION
Now that you know this, you can make goals that actually serves you and do not put you into depression
You also know that results are never guaranteed, you might still fail and it’s okay
We know we can continue improving our probability of having our dream by selecting our goals
And we know that concept of time given to us is really like witchcraft
For time alone cannot get us to the goal
And nothing happens, unless something moves.
Thanks for reading this.
I am open to having this discussion further on my
WhatsApp https://wa.me/255685097713
Email nickyrabit@gmail.com
Cheers