WORTHLESS GOALS

Make your goals SMART! Make them specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and, by gosh, make them time bound! That’s what we’ve been told anyway. Your goals must be realistic, they have to be achievable, and they have to have a deadline. But I say, ‘Bullshit!’

I think many of the ideas around what goals are, what they should be, what they shouldn’t be, how they should be set and the importance of all and how they are expressed by coaches, teachers, bosses, managers, and the thousands of books on the topic are simply wrong, which has led many an individual down a path to disappointment and shame.

Good morning my friends and welcome back to the show. My name is Blaine Feyen, founder of the coaching academy and your host for this, and every episode of the always sponsor free, Real Value Podcast.

In today’s show, we’re going to be talking about the idea of goals and the practice of goal setting and why I think the process, at least as it’s been taught for generations, has all but ruined you for any real accomplishments, more importantly, any real joy in life and business.

Before we do that, if you’re an appraiser and have been putting off or struggling growing the non-lender or private side of your appraisal business, I want to help. I’ve been teaching appraisers how to build a non-lender/private appraisal business that rivals your lender business for many years now because I did just that in my own business after the great financial meltdown of 2009. So, I’ve recorded an hour and 20 minute training video showing you exactly what to do to start building the non-lending side of your business and it’s completely free. Just go to www.CoachBlaine.com/diversify and you can watch it there. There’s nothing to buy, it’s just 80 solid minutes of what to do, how to do it, and what tools to use to start building a thriving and profitable private appraisal business.

Yes, the title of the show is ‘worthless goals’, not because your goals are worthless, although they might be, but because the way they’re typically taught is similar to the way most things are taught in elementary school as we’re growing up. In a way that requires us to stop listening to our creative, unreasonable, completely foolish and childlike side, and, instead, start using our completely rational, analytical, boring, and almost completely devoid of any creativity and life side of our brains.

I’ll say this now, and probable several more times throughout the show because it’s that important: your goals do not need to be realistic, they just need to be believable.

Over the years, I have had moments of creativity trying to break through the very rational and logical thinking patterns that have encrusted my frontal lobe and I’ll pick up a pen or some markers and practice drawing something. I have some journals throughout the years that have some sketches and loose drawings that speak to the creative yearning in me that sometimes wants to come out, but then quickly gets put back in the corner when I realize, or at least tell myself, I’m not very good at it. Well, as of the last several months, I have unshackled my creative side and have allowed it to become part of a new daily practice of urban sketching watercolor painting after realizing what that practice does for my soul, as well as what it does for my brain.

I wrote a small saying in the front of the sketchbook that I practice all of that work in, and it says, “now is not the time to be reasonable”, which is a phrase I heard one of my current art mentors say while sketching a small scene and being very loose with his lines and what he was seeing. His point was that, oftentimes our brains get in the way of what we’re trying to put down on the paper and we fall into the trap of trying to make what ends up in the sketchbook as realistic as what we’re looking at. If your drawing or painting skills aren’t up to that challenge yet, or if you have no interest in actually drawing to that level of realism (which is me), then you can end up falling into the rut of looking at your sketch and being embarrassed  at what you see because it doesn’t perfectly match the reality you’re looking at.

I’ve fallen into this trap many times over the last few months, until I heard him say, ‘now is not the time to be reasonable’. What I’ve learned from that teacher, and several others since then, is that the phrase that should immediately follow that idea of your art not needing to be reasonable, is that it merely needs to be believable, and really only by you. It’s your art. Many of the things that end up on the page need only be suggestions of what something might be, not necessarily an engineer’s rendering of that thing.

A building can be merely a shape that reminds you of that building whenever you look back at the sketch. A car, a bus, a person or people, need not have many details that a real human or car would have in real life but, instead, need only to be suggestive of the thing because your brain will fill in the rest with the past information it has about similar things. A couple of weird shapes and colors on the page merely suggest that it’s a car sitting on a street in front of a building and, when you or anyone else looks at it, it becomes believable, although not necessarily matching reality.

Your goals need not be realistic, they need only to be believable…by you.

“So, what’s with the worthless goals thing, Blaine?” I’m glad you asked! I’ve come to the realization after 53 years on this planet that there are some things in life that are simply not worth pursuing. This notion, that some goals might be worthless, does not mean that what I’ve deemed worthless for me to pursue needs to also be what you deem worthless. I’ll simply be sharing in this episode some of the things I’ve learned about goal setting after doing it for many decades now, and having it taught and coached on the art and skill of setting goals for at least 2 of those decades.

The first thing that I’ve deemed to be a worthless pursuit when it comes to goals is things. Another word that could replace the word ‘things’ is ‘stuff’. We typically want to acquire something because of what we believe having that thing will do for our emotions, what that thing will say to the rest of the world about us, and, many times, simply because somebody we’ve admired or respected over the years had something like that, so it ended up on our goal sheet.

Please don’t take this one the wrong way. If you tell me that you had pictures of a house on your vision board 10 years ago and now you live in that house, I say congratulations! I have had that very experience many times in my life where I had a goal, I created a vision around that goal, I conjured up all the emotions of having that thing and what life would be like once I had that thing, and that thing eventually  ended up in my driveway, my yard, my bank account, my P&L statement, my balance sheet, or wherever things end up being measured from an ownership standpoint in life.

I believe in the process and I know how to do it the proper way, instead of the way it’s typically taught. Nevertheless, I also learned a very valuable ‘counter’ lesson to the acquisition of ‘things’ goals and it is this: not needing the thing is even better than having it.

This one took me many years to really grasp because it’s one of those things that you might not really believe or accept until you acquire something and then get sick of it. I had to dream about, set a goal to acquire, and eventually acquire a speedboat to realize that not needing a speedboat is better than having the speedboat. To be clear, we’ve really enjoyed our speedboat! I learned how to wake surf and foil surf, Jolene is an avid and very good water skier, and we love being out on the water.

Nevertheless, the ‘thing’ requires a fair amount of extra work to enjoy it. We don’t live on water so, when we want to use it, we have to drive up to our other location where the boat is stored in the barn, hook it up, gas it up, drive it to the launch, put it in the water, go park the truck and trailer, spend the day on the water, and then do all of that process in reverse to put the boat away. At the end of the season, there’s the cleaning, the winterizing, the storing, the inevitable broken engine part, etcetera, not to mention the money and other resources that goes into the ownership of that ‘thing’.

Do I regret buying a boat? Not at all, but I have come to realize that the boat owns me, I don’t own the boat. Jolene and I are adventurous, so we have motorcycles, boats, mountain bikes, travel vehicles, camping and hiking gear, ski and snowboard gear, and all the things. All of those things allow us to lead the kind of life we want to lead and have the kinds of experiences we want to have, but all of those things require resources, storage, care and feeding, insurance, and, to some degree worry, so we have fully recognized that the stuff owns us, we don’t own it. We’re just ok with the cost of ownership of those things at the moment because they still bring us more joy than sorrow. As soon as that balance shifts, the thing goes away.

The lesson and takeaway from this one (at least for me) is that, if acquiring and owning the thing, whatever that thing may be, will actually diminish your happiness, your joy, your resources, and some part of your life, it may be a worthless goal. If your life will be enhanced in some way, and you can accept that the thing(s) will own you to some degree, then it might be worthwhile. But always remember, not needing or wanting something is often better than having that thing. The desire to have something can often bring more strife, more anxiety, more angst, and less joy than having the thing will ultimately bring. Think long and hard about the stuff you desire to acquire and whether or not your life will be better for having the thing, and more importantly, how it will be better.

The next realization I’ve had over the years regarding goals that are worthless, at least to me, are the goals that are about either being ‘the most’ or ‘having the most’.

If one of your goals is to be the best at something, of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. If you want to be the best golfer, the best baseball player, the best appraiser, or whatever category you desire to be the best in, I say go for it. The big problem is in defining what ‘best’ means, then measuring when ‘best’ is achieved, and then quantifying what it took from you to be the best versus what it gave back.

The reality is that, other than being a professional athlete, being the best at something should really be a competitive exercise of you against yourself, not you against someone else’s statistics. Based purely on mathematics, statistically, there are will only ever be an astronomically small number of ‘the best’s. Of all the football, baseball, basketball, and soccer players who have ever played, there are only a handful that are ever called ‘the best’. In the land of the typical and the statistically average, which is definitely the neighborhood I live in, being the best at something is really just me trying to be a tad better than I was yesterday, although nobody but me is ever measuring and keeping track.

To be the best or to have the most of something is almost purely ego based and falls quite near the narcissism line, and the cost to one’s mental health (and maybe physical health) in trying to achieve something that is unlikely unachievable is, in my opinion, a worthless goal.

Having the most of something falls right into this same category. You may have heard the tongue in cheek meme that the golden rule is, ‘he who has the most gold, rules’, or ‘he who dies with the most toys, wins’. These memes should not be taken as something to try to achieve, but, instead, something to try to avoid at all costs. If you’re objectively the best at something, somebody else will anoint you with that title, you don’t get to do that yourself. If you objectively have the most of something, say, Beanie Babies, then you get your name in a book, the occasional odd local news story, and the cost of storing all those things somewhere. (Not to mention that they’re more or less worthless now as collectibles.)

The takeaways for me on this one is that there is always somebody bigger, faster, stronger, and better; being the best at something should be an internal and individual competition, not an external one against someone else’s standards; and things are just things that we can’t take with us when our time is up. Yes, things can make life more enjoyable and comfortable while we’re here, but having the most of something is a completely worthless goal in light of all the other goals one could choose for their life.

Define what success means for you, decide as soon as possible what is enough for you, and compare where you were yesterday, last week, month, and last year, instead of trying to meet or exceed someone else’s record at something that probably has little meaning in the grand scheme of things.

The next worthless goal, at least for me and as someone in their early 50’s now, is wanting to be liked by others. Don’t get me wrong, I like it when somebody likes me, I just don’t feel the need to make an effort to make people like me. If someone does, great! If they don’t, I spend zero minutes worrying about it and putting in effort to convert them. If they want to, they will. If they don’t, they won’t and it doesn’t serve either of us to fight for something that will likely never be.

I’ve come to the understanding that there are a fair amount people who are in your life for a season and that’s it, and then there are a considerably smaller number of people who are in your circle, or you’re in theirs, for your whole life. There are people who need and want what you contain, or who contain what you want and need. They are in your life for a reason and you are in theirs for a reason. Once that is fulfilled, they may move on or maybe you do. Either way, spend no time suffering over somebody moving out of your life, and spend even less time trying to make people like you.

No matter what you do in life, you’ll find your tribe based on who you are and who they are. The ones who don’t like you aren’t for you, and that has to be ok. Spend your precious limited time focusing on the one’s who have chosen you and allowed you into their circle. Everyone else is on their own journey and it simply doesn’t include you. The one’s for whom you live rent free in their heads because they hate you for one reason or another, that’s on them, not you. Wanting to be liked by others is a losing game and a low value emotion.

Let me restate for those who deliberately chose to mishear me: ‘Wanting’ to be liked by others is a losing game. I didn’t say not to be a good person. I didn’t say that it’s bad if people like you. I didn’t say don’t help your fellow man or woman. I simply indicated that the desire to be liked is where the suffering and waste of your energy occurs. Wanting something is a recognition of lack of that thing. If you want money, you are telling yourself that you don’t have it. This is called negative reinforcement and will only feed more of that into your mindset because no amount will ever be enough. If you want people to like you, you are entertaining the opposite, which is recognition that people may not like you and maybe you should do something about that.

I’m simply saying no, it’s not your job to make people like you. I’m not telling you that it’s ok to be a jerk or to revel in all of the most unappealing and repellant personality traits, I’m simply saying that it’s a worthless expenditure of your life energy to want people to like you. Liking or not liking somebody is up to the individual with the option to do so. If you want me to like you, that’s not up to you, it’s up to me. Me wanting you to like me is not up to me, that’s completely up to you.

I can only focus on being the best version of myself on any given day or interaction and, if you end up liking me as a result, that might be a bonus, but it should never be the reason I’m trying to be the best version of myself because, again, people are often in our lives for a season. One moment that like you and the next they don’t. Wanting to be liked by others is a worthless goal.

The next worthless goal, at least for me, is being right. With this one, I have to make an admission that it wasn’t always this way. I didn’t consciously want to always be right, but it was definitely part of my subconscious motivations. I would often find myself in discussions or debates with friends and family over some of the most innocuous things and debating points until everyone simply surrendered. I thought I won the discussion without recognizing the cost to some of my relationships over this personality trait. I obviously still have some of that in me today, but I try now to recognize that being right is nowhere near as important as listening to the other person’s perspective.

Socrates said, “the only reason I’m the wisest is because I recognize my ignorance.” Always being right typically also means being done. That means that you’re done learning, done growing, done seeing things from different perspectives and vantage points. Always trying to be right is a worthless goal.

These last two worthless goals, at least for me, have been two of the most liberating worthless goals to pink slip and send packing. The first one of those is the ‘getting things done every day’ or ‘accomplishing something each day’ goal.

One of the things that has taken a long time for me to recognize is that it’s ok to not be doing something or accomplishing something and that, in accepting that, I might actually be accomplishing something. A little too meta for you? Yeah, me too! The easiest way to think of this one is to use lessons from physical fitness and working out, especially if that includes lifting weights.

If you lift weights every day, eventually your body starts to give out. It wasn’t designed to be taxed every day without some rest and recovery. What science has since taught us is that our muscles and body tissue doesn’t get stronger when we lift weights, it gets stronger when we rest after lifting the weights. We get stronger in the recovery after a workout, not necessarily in the workout. In the workout is where muscle fibers are torn and damaged, but it’s in the rest and recovery phase that those same fibers have to rebuild stronger to handle the increased load.

And so it is with you mind, your emotions, your spirit, and your goals. There are times to be pushing things forward, and there are times when you literally shouldn’t be doing anything. The time when you are not ‘doing’ or ‘accomplishing’ anything is time when the rest of you is recovering, processing, creating, brewing, doing some mental and emotional filing, and when the real ‘doing’ is often happening. If you have a belief system that says you must be physically or mentally doing something to be accomplishing something, you will eventually burn out.

Friends, at 53 years old, I’ve come to the understanding that having periods of ‘not doing’ is not only ok, but mandatory for me. I thought I was fairly disciplined because I was always doing, creating, writing, recording, planning, preparing, goal setting, and pushing my limits in certain areas. What I didn’t realize was that I was doing more harm than good in some ways because I hadn’t been giving my mind, my brain, and my emotions that vital downtime to recover and rejuvenate.

If you’re one of those people that has to scratch things off your to-do list every day or you don’t feel like you’ve accomplished anything, I want to challenge you to add one more thing to that list: ‘do nothing today’.  Add the words, ‘do nothing today’ to your list and see if you can actually fulfill that to-do item. If you find that you can’t and you just HAVE TO do something, it’s something to work on. There is a hidden cost and energy exchange for everything in the universe.

The cost of always doing and trying to feel accomplished is often hidden, until it’s not. Sometimes the result of that energy exchange and the cost of always doing is burn out, and sometimes its worse. Sometimes the cost is a final. If you want to really be accomplished, set a new goal of not having to get things done every day. Use the time for recovery and rejuvenation. Getting things done every day is a worthless goal.

This last one will hopefully free all of you from the shackles that have kept you in a negative cycle of overworking and shame, like it has me. The last worthless goal, at least for this episode, is a six pack. Yes, my friends, at 53 years old and decades of battling between killer workouts and killer pizzas, I have come to realize that trying to obtain a six pack again is a worthless goal for me.

There was a time in life when I had this elusive six pack and I didn’t have to do anything special to get it or keep it. I was super active and super lean and said six pack was just there. I didn’t do any special exercises or diet regimes, in fact, I ate the same then as I do now, it was just there. In fact, I just saw a picture of myself dancing on a table in bar in Bulgaria with my shirt off when I was in my mid 30’s and there was said six pack.

Yes, part of me longs for those days again, but not because of the six pack, but because I didn’t have to do anything to have it. I didn’t think about it and didn’t try to have it, it was just there. In fact, every one of us has a six pack, for some of us it’s just buried under a layer of intelligent protection at this point. The body gets wiser as it gets older and it realizes that, should famine befall us, that skinny dude dancing on the table will be the first to perish, better build up some reserves.

And that, my friends, is where I stand today on this issue. Of all the energy, focus, and attention I have for important things in life; yes, health and wellness is still one of them, but the six pack has moved to the bottom of the list. I still work out regularly and I still try to eat well at least 80% of the time, just not for a six pack. I eat well 80% of the time so that I can eat not so great the other 20%, which is part of my goal of not accomplishing anything on those days. See what I did there?

In all seriousness, I am well aware that belly fat is a pre-cursor to all sorts of health problems and it’s important for both lifespan and health span to lower body fat whenever and wherever possible and I’m conscious of it all the time.

Nevertheless, having a strong core and having a visible six pack are two vastly different things. Having a strong core is essential to good body movement, longevity in mobility, and being able to do lots of things in daily life. Having visible ab muscles is about one thing and one thing only and that is body fat percentage. To have visible ab muscles, since we all have ab muscles anyway, you have to get down into the teens and below in terms of body fat percentage.

I have two sons, both in their early twenties, both avid weightlifters and workout junkies, who eat well and workout daily and both have a body fat percentage likely in the 10-15% range. Both have very visible six packs, among the many other signs that they workout and eat well, and both of them don’t have to try all that hard to maintain that state. But they’re both in their twenties and that’s the way things often work at that stage of life. It was that way for me too.

In my 50’s, lots of things have happened in the intervening years that make it very tough to have what I and they have in their 20’s, and, while I still have what I consider to be a strong core and am still very active, the prospect of having a visible six pack is not only a long and distant prospect, it’s simply not a goal I care about at this stage, nor should you.

If health, wellness, feeling good, having lots of energy, and the quality of your health span are important to you, and they should be, focus on getting and staying active, moving something heavy regularly, optimizing your diet for muscle growth and maintenance at every age, prioritizing protein in your diet to maintain that muscle at every age, and don’t worry so much about whether or not your ab muscles are visible.

I’m going to go have some pizza and then lift some weights, so, until next time, I’m out…