For years we’ve been taught to define goals for ourselves. The idea was that such goals would be motivating and would create the energy necessary to attain such goals. Describing these goals using SMART criteria was meant to enable the person to know clearly that his goal had been attained and could be celebrated.

It seems that these ideas relied on the idea of linear progress and fulfillment in reaching a goal.

However, progress rarely is linear, especially when the path to reaching a goal involves learning. Normally, learning cannot be predicted. It’s an exploration that can be a series of disappointments until the learning becomes accessible and the goal visible.

The idea of fulfilment in reaching a goal has another drawback, it creates a sense of needing to wait until one reaches the goal to be satisfied. In doing so it doesn’t consider what happens once the goal has been reached. Without consideration of the process, what usually happens is that happiness is delayed until the goal is reached and only lasts for a short while until it becomes clear that the goal isn’t a place that one can stay in. Reaching a goal means that it is time to move on to something else.

Setting goals is a form of living in the future.

This doesn’t make goals useless! In an organization, they could work perfectly well as yardsticks that allow us to measure how well the plans work out, especially if the process involved is well known. Such goals implicitly are not about being reached but about measuring.

It’s also a question of personality and one’s ability to successfully integrate goals into one’s process.

In essence, one needs to figure out for oneself when goals help and when not. There is no automatism available that transforms goals into success.