Everyone knows that one of the components of success is goal-setting. And even the most lazy ones do it even on New Year’s Eve: they make a wish, which, in fact, is their goal in the coming year.
Purposeful people set goals daily. And track their implementation at the end of the day.
Meaning and happiness
In her speech at the NOVUS Summit at the United Nations, Stanford Business School social psychology professor Jennifer Aaker argued that the level of happiness a person experiences is directly proportional to the significance of his personal and professional goals.
Each period of human life has its own definition of happiness, and with age it changes. The older a person becomes, the more meaning he gives to goals and life in general, and the happier and more meaningful life becomes.
In order to plan goals and, accordingly, the level of happiness, Jennifer Aaker offers an easy way to set goals, which, according to the professor, will undoubtedly make everyone happier.
It is necessary to determine the following:
- identify your strengths;
- determine what society needs;
- determine what is attractive to you personally.
Every person is unique
Each has some kind of exceptional, inherent only to him feature. This may be the talent that was given from birth, or the high skill that a person developed through hard work. It can be an attitude or point of view that transforms people and situations around. This may be some specific professional skill that a person masterfully owns.
Community needs
The coincidence of the strong and unique qualities of the individual with the needs of society will help determine the sphere of activity in which a person can maximize his abilities.
This will help to choose a profession that will be significant for a person, valued by society and ultimately make a person happy.
Passion
Everyone in life who has set great goals, personal or professional, inevitably has had and will have difficult times, setbacks, despair, obstacles, problems. And often thoughts and a desire arose to give up everything and do something else. Some threw, but this did not make them happier.
Why are people so persistent in achieving these sometimes seeming crazy goals? Because they are passionate about their ideas. This passion gives strength to survive the time of adversity.
Jennifer Aaker offers a simple way to identify her hobbies: make a list of what a person has been doing the last week. And evaluate each lesson on a ten-point scale. And choose from those classes whose score is higher than eight points.
Meaningful goal
In her speech, Professor Jennifer Aaker made a special emphasis on the fact that a goal that is significant for a particular person does not have to be global in scope. It should be significant for the personality, for its development. Someone can choose for themselves to get into the first hundred in the Forbes list, and someone can grow a beautiful flowerbed in the courtyard of a multi-storey building.
These goals can be significant for each individual person. They are simply different in scale. For the level of happiness that a person experiences, what matters is not the global scale of the goal, but passion and commitment.
As we like to say, it is better to regret what I did than what I did not try to do. Each of us has experienced joy and a sense of happiness when we managed to overcome adversity and do something that friends said was impossible.A big victory over yourself consists of hundreds of small steps, and they may not be visible to others. But every such step and victory of an enthusiastic person makes him happy.
Be happy! Anytime and anywhere!