Structure 003: Goals, Growth, and Grinding

Welcome to this week's issue of Structure. As always, one topic, with the goal of providing you some extra insight into the themes you see online. If you enjoyed feel free to subscribe below!

A Reflection on Goals and the Importance of Personal Direction

The first decade or two of life is often filled with instructions. The roadmap may vary from person to person, but there typically is some form of direction that we are often expected to (roughly) follow. Whether that be finish high school and take over the family business, finish college and get a job, or finish high school and move out as soon as possible. The road really opens up after high school and even more so after college. 

There is so much focus and importance placed on those first 20 or so years, but once you get out on your own there is no real direction. Your parents may push you into a field or you may move somewhere with your friends, but at the end of the day all decisions now fall on you. 

Instead of having a final end goal in sight such as graduation or a sports championship, you now have retirement to look forward to way down the road. There are workplace goals such as promotions and general career growth, but if that becomes the only important piece of your life things can get dark relatively quickly. I personally put a huge focus on work and my career, but I have found it massively important to think about what else I want to accomplish outside of that. 

Does the story of your life revolve around work or is work just one piece of the puzzle?

As cliche as this is, goals actually hold some value in this discussion. Until a few years ago I was never interested in setting goals. It wasn’t until the doors of life were left wide open that I realized it was nice to have an extra dose of focus. All throughout my years of schooling we were encouraged to set goals and discuss them. It was usually a tedious exercise for me. All my goals were right in front of me, get a good grade in all of my classes, perform well in sports, and make some money in the summer. Once I got to college I had the overarching goal of graduating in great standing and setting myself up for a job etc…

Don’t get me wrong, especially in college I was laser focused, but there was never any true mindset behind my goals. They felt like a natural progression rather than something I was setting out to do. 

The real benefit comes from that mindset. 

There is a lack of direction in life especially when you are young and on your own, but that’s the best part. You can give yourself all the direction you want. Goals are a great way to do exactly that. 

Goals come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but around this time of the year the focus is always on year long goals. Also known as my favorite kind of goal. Year long goals give you the chance to really do something. Shorter term goals are great for making progress and getting started, but year long goals (or larger) are where the real work is done. You can start a hobby and achieve an impressive level of mastery in a year, you can build a side hustle to profitability in a year, you can lose 50 pounds in a year or find a partner for life and marry them. Social media and the internet today often force us to stare at representations of the perfect life, the perfect person, or the perfect relationship. It’s hard not to start dreaming about yourself in those situations. One year provides enough time for you to actually achieve or make significant progress towards these dreams. 

Life is filled with external pressures dragging us in every direction. It is so easy to just go with the flow and end up lost in the sauce. A quality goal provides an internal north star for you to look towards and find your way. The athlete in me loves to have something in mind to focus on long term. Something to work towards and make progress on with the hopes of eventually being able to rise to the challenge. 

If you spend enough time on Twitter or Instagram you’ll see a lot of noise around how to craft the perfect goal or the importance of setting them. I’m not here to talk about how to set your goals, just here to discuss the fact that having an extra source of inspiration or focus in life can really improve life in the long run. Goals can be focused on anything, too often people center goals around physical attributes even if that isn’t where their heart is. My only advice is think hard about the person you want to be, and work towards one aspect of that figure. Whether you 100% complete your goal in time is also unimportant. There are more than enough quotes out there about how important the journey is. Goals just help you make sure your journey is following the path you want.

That’s all I’ve got today, set some goals and knock them out. Follow your star whatever it looks like. 

Till next time,

Braxton

Song of the Week

As a thank you for checking out this week's edition of Structure here's a song I've been listening to lately:

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