Heroes Not Zombies

I don’t know about you, but I’m not a great fan of goals. I know, almost every book you read about personal improvement, “getting things done” or management methods harps on about goals. Have a look at 43 things, which is a website which is supposed to help you achieve your goals –

People have known for years that making a list of goals is the best way to achieve them. But most of us never get around to making a list. 43 Things is great for that! Make a list on 43 Things and see what changes happen in your life. Best of all it’s a way of connecting with other enthusiasts interested in everything from watching a space shuttle launch to grow my own vegetables. So the next time someone asks you, “what do you do?” you can answer with confidence, “I am doing 43 things!”.

One of the interesting things on this site is the list of the “all-time most popular goals“. It might not surprise you to see that number one is “lose weight”. And the fact that number two is “stop procrastinating” will give you some idea of the likely success rate of subscribers! (actually reading their comments on their progress is really a rather sad experience 😦 ) Some of the goals are quite well circumscribed, like “buy a house”, and “get a tattoo”. What bothers me about those kinds of goals is that the goal itself has little to do with daily life. Buying a house is an event. Getting a tattoo is an event. Quite a lot of goals are like that. Now there’s nothing wrong with planning to experience an event, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting a house (though why people want tattoos escapes me!!), but the process of getting there is unrelated to the end goal. I always found those suggestions about visualising your goal (like they do in the Secret) a bit naff.

Other goals aren’t like that. “Learn Spanish”, “Learn to play the guitar”, “Practice yoga”, for example are activities. Turning activities into goals though risks developing a tick box mentality. When do you reach a goal like that? When do you say “OK, that’s Spanish cracked, what now?” But there’s something about these goals that appeals more than the event type.

Before I finish this little rant about goals, I’m pretty sure the reason I got so fed up with goal-setting was the introduction of “targets” into the National Health Service. Not only would I dispute the prioritisation of the particular targets, but it annoys me how so much of the health service’s resources are then consumed hitting those targets. Targets distort health care and move the focus away from the individual patients to the declared outcomes either politicians or managers have decided are most important. And don’t get me started on “measurable” targets because what they do is give what can be measured greater priority over what can’t.

And yet……there’s a nagging doubt that goals aren’t all that bad, that they can be a way of bringing focus, and contributing towards motivation. But my lingering discomfort comes from the many people I’ve met who are not living the life they want to live but have some goal, some time in the future, (after retirement or winning the lottery are two common future scenarios), which they would like to achieve, get, experience, or whatever, but by the time that some time arrives it’s too late and in fact they never live the life they wanted to live.

Well, my brain works in a way that makes connections between ideas and I’ve long been fascinated by something called fractals. A fractal is a shape which looks pretty much the same at whichever level of magnification you view it. It’s based on a characteristic called “self-similarity” (others call this phenomenon “self-symmetry”). When you use a mathematical formula to create a pattern based on this type of symmetry you get beautiful images.

What’s this got to do with goals? Well, the issue of doing one completely different thing, to get to another, like, say, working 9 – 5 in a job you hate to put enough money in a retirement fund which you hope will enable you to do what you really want to do in 30 or 40 years time, just strikes me as crazy. It’s not a way to live. If I’ve got a goal, then the experience of working towards it should, ideally, be as good as the goal itself. That way, I experience what I’m hoping for today, and in a way that will, hopefully, grow and continue to deepen. Take learning a language for example. I decided I’d like to learn Japanese and enrolled in an evening class at Glasgow University. It’s fun. I really enjoy it and so far I’ve learned all the hiragana characters and am moving on to learn the katakana ones. It’s like learning to crack a secret code and the fact I can now read a menu in Tokyo is a great thrill! But there isn’t an “end point”, there’s no box to tick. There might be exams in my course but I’ve no desire to get a certificate. It’s the learning that’s the thrill. You could say the same about my photography. I could say I’d like to take better photographs but I do that by taking better photographs, carrying my camera with me everywhere and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. These “goals” have the quality of self-similarity. They look the same no matter what time scale you examine them under – today, next week, this next year, by the time I’m 65.

I have a notion that if we keep the idea of the fractal in our heads when thinking about goal setting we’ll have more chance of living a life NOW that we choose and enjoy AND which leads us to where we want to go.