Treating goals the right way

Goals and dreams serve different purposes- dreams are long-term aspirations, while goals are the practical steps needed to achieve them. Success requires more than just desire; it involves creating a clear plan to guide your actions. Emotional attachment can make reaching goals harder, as it often leads to frustration when mistakes happen or outcomes don't meet expectations. The key is to focus on what you can control, align your efforts with your values, and avoid fixating on uncontrollable results. With the right approach, goals become the tools to turn dreams into reality.

Differentiating between goals and dreams

A goal and a dream aren’t the same. For one because a dream indicates that it‘s something you want to achieve over the course of a long time period. Goals can be short term or long term but they’re never something you initially wanted to last for a lifetime.

Setting something to your mind and achieving it, can change your life. Dreams are how you want your life / a smaller aspect of your life to be while goals are the tool to make the change.

Let’s say you set a New Year resolution for yourself, e.g

“Next year, I want to finally get fit“

The problem with most New Year resolutions is that there is no plan included. You know what you want, which is what you write down like in this example. However you don’t have a procedure to follow, in order to get there. I’ve heard this a lot of times:

I don’t need a plan, I’ll just work out more.

You might not want to have everything planned out and that’s fine. Nonetheless there is evidence that only telling yourself you’re going to do something won‘t do the trick. It’s like building an Ikea shelf without an instruction manual. Generally speaking, you know what to do: turn a few screws here and there and put the pieces together. The hard part is transferring it to your own situation.

The general set-up