Embrace Consistency Over Perfection 2024.8.23

Everyone sets goals for careers, family life, financial plans, and personal habits. It’s great to have goals so that when you wake up you feel energetic to do something to achieve your goals. But how can we develop better strategies for setting goals in different areas of life? An outdated method is to divide your big goal into three categories: the final goal, the mid-term goal, and the short-term goal. Beyond this approach, how can we maintain our values or make sure we can keep going toward the success we believe in? Here are three strategies for reference.

1. Reduce the difficult and impossible goals: 

The key to setting goals is to let you know how to ensure you are on the correct path to the goals. Too many challenging goals are hard to break down into little steps and make us feel upset when realizing how far we are still from achieving them. Then, we give up on achieving doing what we want to achieve. Set some reasonable goals at first, and when we have a little progress, set the harder ones.

2. Be consistent: 

Sometimes, it takes decades to become an expert in specific areas. How you can keep on practicing or doing something for a long time is more important than what your goals are. If you can keep on doing certain things consistently over time for a lifetime, you can achieve anything more easily than others. Find a balance between you current achievements and what you are eager to achieve in the future, which can help you keep on learning skills you don’t have now.

3. Be brave about giving up: 

When we realize some goals are not important to us anymore, don’t feel guilty about giving up even if we have spent many hours on them. We can’t achieve everything, but we can always focus on what is the most important. Giving up is not abandoning the efforts we’ve made previously but about making essential progress in our lives,

Especially as adults, we are burned out from job and family responsibilities. Goals are not meant to add more pressure but are intended for a better life we want to have. Feel free to celebrate when achieving a little and don’t put the blame on yourself when failing at something. Hopefully, we can find joy in achieving some goals and continue setting new ones.