Set and Achieve Your Life Goals

Life goals are what we want to achieve, and they’re much more meaningful than just “what we need to accomplish to survive”. Unlike daily routines or short-term objectives, they drive our behaviors over the long run.

SMART acronym

SMART is an acronym that is used to guide goal setting.

To make sure the goals are clear and reachable, each one should be:

• Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
• Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
• Achievable (agreed, attainable).
• Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
• Time-bound (time-based, time-limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).

Life goals

When setting personal goals we should have 3 primary goals to accomplish as we plan for life:

1. Relationship Harmony

   Maintaining and expanding as well as restoring and healing in this area should be a top priority in one’s personal goals. This journey focus on developing a proper mindset, empathy, and gentleness.

   I would like to enumerate here a few important relationships

   • Relationship with spouse
   • Relationship with parents
   • Relationship with children
   • Relationship with neighbors
   • Relationship with friends

2. Financial Independence

   Getting one’s “financial house” in order is an essential priority. The best gift one can give to themselves is financial education. Check out various great advice in this area. Hire financial experts but never give away control of one’s finances to anyone else.

3. Improved Physical Health

   Commit to Improving your Physical Health. There are no guarantees about living a long life, but it is possible to greatly increase one’s odds. One should listen to their body and create an exercise plan that one can enjoy and relish.

Someone can have more additional goals such as

1. Career Passion

   When people set goals, they almost always look toward their careers first. career is important but it is not the only one. Set a goal that one should be to passionately enjoy the chosen profession while maintaining an excellent balance between home and work.

2. Stress Buster

   Stress can be a killer. Time must be set aside to relax and just enjoy life. There are several ways one can disconnect from their day-2-day life and give away or spend leisure time or reduce stress. Some might choose to do social service, volunteer, or do pet projects.

BOOKS Recommendations

GOALS!
By Brian Tracy

Lessons Learned:

1. To earn more, you must learn more. Read 60 min every day
2. Tap Into your subconscious mind
3. Set Your Goals

I have found the below questions useful for setting SMART goals.

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE
By Stephen R. Covey

The only thing one needs to consider about Time Management or Decision Making is explained well in this 4-quadrants matrix

Conclusion

Most of us (sadly including me) are caught up in the mythology that you need to get a good job, settle down and chain yourself to a retirement package for the rest of your life. Although I believe that the goals, I outlined above are not unique and many people do share them.

In the broader vision of one’s life, not getting into the implementation details, one will have the above goals. The implementation details of the goals might change from one to another person. Also, the details might not be the same over the period for the same person.

Achieving these goals makes one satisfied. Most of them are simple and can improve your quality of life. Working on challenging and meaningful goals accounts for 90% of one’s happiness. Only 10% is based on external factors which you cannot control.

I found the below template useful to write goals and achieve them.

SMART Goal # My goal is to [ S ] ____________________________ ________________________________. Which will be measured by [ M ] ________________________ __________________________________________________________________. I will accomplish this by [ A1 ] __________________________ which I know is realistic because [ A2 ] _____________________ ________________________________________________________________. This effort is worthwhile because [ R ] ________________________ ____________________________________________ and it will be achieved by [ T1 ] ______________ ______________________________________________________ with milestones set at [ T2 ] ____ __________________________________.

All the Best!

Web Resources

• smart-goals
• the-6-steps-to-a-smart-goal

Satya Dillikar

Hands-on Software Architect with extensive experience developing and delivering distributed enterprise-class mission-critical software applications.

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