Life Lists and Achieving Your Goals
What do your top 10 goals reveal about you?
Life Lists
A life list is simply a list of your life goals; a compilation of things you will regret not doing when it becomes too late. It is more than a simple list of what to do when you are bored; this is a declaration of your life goals.
Some recommend life lists of 101 goals others say keep it short. Our view is that it doesn’t matter how many items you have on your life list – 50 goals for your life is not necessarily better than your top 10 life goals – achieving life goals is what counts.
Life lists are everywhere – and it seems for some people the key to a great life can be found in setting and achieving life goals. If this is you, then why not compile a life list?
Do goals help us achieve happiness? Click here.
Regardless of your view of the effectiveness of life lists or the need to set life goals, you will have probably noticed that they have caught the imagination of many people. But remember this: setting life goals does not mean much – accomplishing goals is what counts!
Your life will be defined by what you want and crucially how you go about getting it.
Achieving Goals
Setting life goals can help you achieve a great life as long as you set well-defined goals and go about achieving your goals in a great way. Writing a wish list without action is no help whatsoever and going after a dream in the wrong way may be detrimental.
Take the following statement – to become rich – is this a goal or a dream? Think about these points:
- It does not show you how to, so it does not exclude theft, gambling, or bogus schemes;
- It focuses on an outcome and not performance; how do you know when you have achieved it, is enough ever enough?
- What about the cost to you of doing this – what are you prepared to lose along the way, time, friends, quality of life?
Being rich is perhaps a great dream but not a great goal and stated in this way it is arguably more likely lead you down the route of internet scams and get rich quick schemes than put any serious money on the table.
Have a look at the great goals checklist of click here for some more thoughts on Achieving goals
The Great Goal Checklist
1. Is the goal expressed in a positive statement: ‘what I want’, not ‘what I want to avoid’?
2. Will you know when you have successfully completed it? What you will see, hear, feel, do (etc) when it has been achieved?
3. Does the goal focus on performance and not outcome?
4. Can the goal be started and maintained by you alone? You can only change yourself after all!
5. Will the goal will cause you to lose anything that you currently value.
6. Is there a GAP*?
7. It is realistic and is it unlikely to produce overwhelm or upset the balance you are seeking?
8. Does it honour your values and it is worth the costs (think in terms of time, expense and energy)?
*GAP: From Creative Steps: How to Coach yourself to increasing Creativity. Growth Achievement and Passion
Why are creativity goals so common?
Although some people will put the goal ‘to be rich’ on the life list, I have actually found that this isn’t very common. A life list is a compilation of things you will regret not doing when it becomes too late. Money is no good then!
More often people put down goals in areas such as love, travel, creativity.
Indeed, if you were to do a quick internet search for life goals or life list goals you would probably find that most people have a creative goal or a creative project on their life list. Why is that?
Here are some creative goals I found in a recent search:
Write, direct, film, and edit a 15-minute movie – post it online
Write a short story
Paint a picture worth framing
Hold an art exhibition
Record an album of original music
Creative projects, for example to write a book, can bring great financial and social rewards but starting a project for these reasons is likely to bring disappointment. When I ask the creative steps case studies and alumni what they get through accomplishing a significant creative goal they talk about the following type of benefits:
Experiencing the world more fully
Being seen differently
Seeing yourself differently
Sense of enormous satisfaction
Adding some colour or spice to life
Developing your full potential
Expressing yourself more fully
Inspire others
Having fun
What would be on your life list and what does that say about you?
Know this: having outstanding creative projects on your life list does not make you any more creative or bring you closer to a creative life. It shows that you have urges – that you want to be creative – but that is it. It certainly doesn’t necessarily reveal your life purpose. Life lists without action are not enough.
Your life will be defined by what you want and crucially how you go about getting it.
Action is crucial. We are all born creative but sometimes along the road we lose our path. We forget how to be creative. We set inappropriate goals that steal us of our motivation and we learn habits and assume behaviours that inhibit our creativity and strangle our capability to finish worthwhile projects.
Something happens and that creative dream becomes an interminable project; like the proverbial unfinished manuscript that sits in the drawer of countless writers, artists, intellectuals and other creative people.
Our lives are perhaps defined by our successes and failures, but they are diminished by the weight of unfinished plans. Find out more.
Know this: your top 10 goals reveal the things that are important to you but you have not yet done. That is it. They do not tell me what you will do; only what you would like to do, someday one day, if you get round to it.
What is more, your creative dreams do not get closer to completion the longer you leave them on the life list! If you have already missed a deadline you become increasingly unlikely to return to the project and finish it! So if it has been on the life list for a while it is likely to stay there a whole while longer! Does something need to change?
Recent Creative Steps Projects
Write a book
Produce a comic for friends and associates
Write and act in a one-person show
Make jewellery and sell it online
Hold an art exhibition
Paint a picture worth framing
‘Fill a sketch book with things I have seen 100 times before but never paid any attention to’
Get an article published in a newspaper or magazine
Compile a recipe book
Do you know that you unfulfilled plans have weight? Find out more here