It's intriguing that we once in a while talk about the impact of goals in our way of life despite the fact that they sway us from the earliest starting point of life. It begins when we are still a baby in a cradle. That pivotal first day that we enter kindergarten is the door to a perpetual cycle of evaluation that will follow us profoundly into adulthood. These evaluations has itself created a purpose established by society which is to measure our progress towards conquering a subject area or landing a job.
If you want evidence for this, just ask your friends for an advice and you will be able to see advices ranging from changing your jobs, lose specific amount of weight, become an entrepreneur, become a millionaire to even watch specific television series. To be honest, everything we want or need to do is seen as a goal or an objective. By saying this, I don’t portray that goals are bad or a waste of time. Most of them are really admirable but can we imagine a life with few goals or even without goals? Will it make sense to live such a life? No matter what answers you give to these questions, one thing is for sure that our culture give the utmost importance to having goals in one’s life.
We can look at a lot of examples in this world which presents a totally different perspective. You must know a few if not a lot of people who started their careers in different field and ended up doing a completely dissimilar thing. For example, the internet giant Youtube was started with an idea of a video dating site. The developers turned towards a different direction by making it a video sharing app and the result speak for itself. .
Writer of the famous Harry Potter series, J.K Rowling, was a bilingual secretary for Amnesty International and then taught English to students learning it as a second language in Portugal. Who would have thought at that time that she will be able to write such a brilliant fantasy novel series in the near future? You can argue that these kinds of stories happen only to luckiest of lucky people. But a recent study found that serendipity isn’t that selective and almost two third of the adults attribute some aspect of their career choice to serendipity.
It does not matter that whether you are trying to find love, choosing a career or ambitious to start a new company, there are sufficient signs that sticking to your goals is not part of the story of the most successful stories !
This post was influenced from the book "Why Greatness can not be planned" by Kenneth O.Stanley and Joel Lehman.