If you want to achieve your goals don't focus on them

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2PP3p4_4R8&t=141s


This is Day 2 of the One TED Talk a Day initiative. Today's TED Talk is by Reggie Rivers. The topic of his TED Talk is "If you want to achieve your goals don't focus on them".

• Goals require you to have participation of other people hence they are outside of your control. 
• Behaviors are something that are completely in our control so we should focus on our behaviors to achieve our goals.
• See and plan what you can do today, tomorrow and this week. 

The speaker in this TED talk has a simple message to convey with a very humorous talk to keep the audience engaged and interested. 

He emphasizes that if you want to achieve your goals you should not focus on them. Focusing on the goals makes us focus on everything that is not in our control. The end result or the outcome is not in our control. 

Hence, he suggests that we should rather focus on our actions and our behaviors. Having a short term focus as suggested helps us stay on track without getting overwhelmed.

It's a simple yet effective advice. I would certainly try to inculcate this.

Your personal goals - Shout out loud or keep them to yourself ?

The new year 2015. I know it is kind of late to write about the new year but still as the first quarter of the year has ended I realize this indeed is a good time to write about it. As per my opinion, the problem with being too much energetic or enthusiastic at the beginning of the year is that we end up making too many commitments to ourselves and then end up not being able to live up to them.

Now, since those commitments had been made to ourselves alone, we fail to monitor ourselves well enough to check our progress time and again and hence we lose the track. The cycle repeats itself over and over again every year.

The solution to this, I believe, is to become accountable to someone for your achievements and goals. What I mean here is that we can try to be explicitly vocal about things that we want to achieve in the year to some people we can trust and we know are going to push us when we feel like drifting away. These people can be your best friends, siblings, parents etc. But a minor detail that is important here is that that person(s) should motivate you when you are going off the track and should not rather draw energy out of you. 

So, when we are accountable to others about what we do and do not achieve, we tend to push ourselves in the times of crisis because there is a certain aspect of social reputation that is attached to it. This is something to be tried and tested to see the results.

If we do try and implement this, we would not impractically over-commit and would also have a feasible method of going about our goals as we would know that the status of our progress is being monitored.

Ah well now you may or may not agree with whatever I just said but still you should watch this TED talk below by Derek Sivers that is completely opposite of what I just discussed.

The blog link for the same is here http://sivers.org/zipit 

I personally do not agree with Sivers here but you may choose one of the two methods and see the results for yourself. I would love to know which of the two methods you tried; being socially active about your goals or keeping them to yourself and which one worked for you, do let me know in the comments.

P.S: Reference link that goes in my favor is here.