The case for goals

So many people are against having goals. They simply see no purpose in it.

I, on the other side, cannot remember a moment in my life in which I didn't have a thing I was deliriously looking forward to - or not a happy moment of it. I think having goals is important to guarantee you are going to take something seriously in life, because it is oh so easy to follow onto the trap of getting to bed today and getting up tomorrow being enough. And more often than not, having goals is also important to make sure you do not take anything else as seriously as what really matters.

What trips me more on meeting those people halfway, the ones against goals, is that goals can look like anything. They can take any amount of time, involve any amount of money, count on any amount of people (including none). What do you mean you can't find a shape of it that has some use to you?

Because even though goals come in all shapes and sizes, all of them without fail, if successful, will lead you to that extra-corporeous feeling of being alive. You know? That moment in which you don't want to blink because life feels too real now, in a way you know you won't be able to capture, not even in the pictures being taken of you by your friends.

I have had a handful of moments like that in life. And plenty of them were goals that started on a piece of paper.

Plenty, but not all.

Not everything in my life has happened in such a predictable and organized manner. Obviously. It doesn't matter how good you get at Notion, you still won't be able to plan more than maybe 10% of what happens in your life.

And that's something else people keep saying against goals. What's the point of all this organizing then? If things are gonna happen, wreak havoc to my plans and live in shambles? If someone is gonna accomplish it by sheer luck, on birth or on path?

Well, because both these things can be, and are, true: accidents happen but life does not happen by accident.

Remember that.