Are Conflicting Goals Preventing You from Succeeding?

“Life is series of missed opportunities.” One of my professors at architecture school used to tell me this when I had to miss a fun event in order to complete a project on time. As pessimistic as this view of life may be, nonetheless it embeds a valuable lesson. Life requires making choices. Inevitably we are going to miss out on something, at least temporarily. The key is to be intentional about it.

As you develop your goals, in addition to considering the benefits of obtaining them also consider the costs:

What expenditure of time, money, emotion, physical energy, and spiritual stamina is required to meet your objective?

Who will have to make these outlays: you, your spouse, and/or your children?

Are they prepared to do so?

By making sure everyone who is impacted has input, especially to your major goals, you increase your chance of success and decrease the likelihood that you will have to give up an opportunity.

Additionally, part of the process of setting goals is determining priorities. Just like when your attention is diverted from a task it takes time for you to deal with the distraction then refocus on what you were doing before, so too for achieving an objective. Take two major goals:

Establish a close, resilient, relationship with your children

Excel professionally

Accomplishing these at the same time will be difficult at best. Both require a great deal of time and attention. So-called “quality time” is a myth. If you cannot advance at work or build a business through quality time, why would it work with your children? It may seem that you are accomplishing both. Only later do you find the high-quality relationship it not actually there.

This is not to say that you cannot have both. Only that you decrease your chance of success when you make conflicting goals.

One of the reasons I strongly advocate entrepreneurship is the flexibility it allows for life planning. Your business does not have to be constantly on growth trajectory. Once it gets to a certain level you may choose to stay there for a while so you can focus on another stage of your life, such as parenting.

While it is true that “man plans and G-d laughs,” still determining that you will give up some goals in life and deconflict your plan to achieve those you choose to pursue will dramatically increase your chance of success.

Question – What conflicting goals do you need to resolve?
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