The common goal-setting mistake you might be making

Whenever you set a goal, you always have to understand if that goal is a means goal or an end goal. Too many people fall into a trap by not knowing the difference. End goals light you up. Means goals feel like projects. Think about it. End goals are the things that are truly the most beautiful aspects of the human experience. Cradling a newborn baby in your arm. Waking up next to someone you truly love. Making breakfast for your family on a Sunday morning. Cuddling with a loved one. Being able to hop on a bicycle and cycle with friends or family as you observe a sunset along the bay. Travel the world and take beautiful pictures. Experience fine dining with exotic food. Live in a beautiful apartment that inspires you. Be able to finish a project that you are doing not for some money or some goal, but because you love the act of writing or painting or composing music or coding. All of these are end goals. But we don't set goals for these. We set means goals designed to move us along. Life based on a culturescape idea of how life should unfold in confession I used to work in the legal industry. So I had a lot of lawyer friends. I worked with a lot of lawyers, had a lot of friends who were lawyers. And I always found it really interesting that people become lawyers. Here's why. If you're a lawyer in America or in Australia, there are studies that show that you have a 50% chance of clinical depression. 50%. Yet every year, millions of people decide to go into law. Why? I don't think anyone decides. I want a job where I get to go to court, argue with people, and could potentially be depressed for half my life. Instead, they are seduced by the means goal. Becoming a lawyer or an engineer or a doctor or an entrepreneur is a means goal, not an end goal. Let me tell you why. I have a friend who graduated law from Harvard University. Very dear friend. We went to the University of Michigan together. He graduated from Harvard University, met his wife in Boston, moved into a beautiful penthouse apartment overlooking the city, and was really excited about when he finally was able to practice law. But soon he found that it wasn't what it was made out to be. He was working crazy long hours. He told me 120 hours in some weeks. And soon, within a span of two to three years, his marriage started unraveling. His partner, who was also a lawyer, was also working so hard, they simply couldn't provide enough attention to each other. The marriage ended, he sank into a depression. He was making so much money, but he just wasn't fulfilled. He decided to quit. And when he Quit. He decided to go and do something completely different. He decided to buy a bike and cycle across the United States simply on a bike, living a minimalist lifestyle. And for the first time, he was happy. Well, he fell into the same means goal versus end goal trap that I did when I became an engineer at Microsoft. He was chasing the means to an end. Think about if you're doing this too. When I asked my friend why he wanted to become a lawyer, he said because he wanted to change the world. He was excited about getting into international law, about being able to fight for the rights of refugees. He never actually got to do that because he fell into the means gold strap. He decided that his life was going to unfold in a specific way. He was going to do good in school, pass the lsat, get into a law firm, become a partner, work hard, eventually work harder and harder and harder until he could be a famous international rights lawyer. And of course, it didn't go that way. But if he had done the three most important questions and asked himself the questions that lead to discovering his true end goals, his part to happiness might have been a lot more streamlined and effective. And that's really where end goals benefit. End goals allow you to streamline your path to happiness by giving you clarity on what you truly want. You see, my friend didn't really want to be an international rights lawyer. That was a means goal. What he really wanted was to help people to support human rights. That was what made him light up. It didn't matter how he did that. It was what he was obsessed with, human rights. As CS Lewis said, you do not have a soul. You are a soul. What you have is a body. We forget that and we fall into this trap to try to look at means goals as our dominant goal mechanism, the means to an end when instead you should be focused and obsessed with the end, with a beautiful picture of the life of you want to lead. When we nail our end goals, something happens. It's like our minds, our subconscious, our spiritual core figures out a way to shortcut our movement towards those end goals. This is why we should momentarily set aside the means goals and focus just on the end goals. If you study many great spiritual practices involving creative visualization or manifesting, you will hear the spiritual teacher say, focus on the what and the why. Forget the how. This is essentially what we are doing. When we apply the three most important questions, you're going to ask yourself three questions designed to get you to the core of your end goals. And these questions are going to shine a beautiful light on your life.