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Feb

21

Goal-Setting Philosophies - The Long and the Short Road Ahead

Rocks and Train

I recently was linked to an article called Jump-Start Your Savings With A Financial Fast and was surprised that in a sort-of roundabout way I’ve taken these principles and applied them to my own life already, or have taken these ideas into practice for my new self-challenge in simplicity and frugality.

I disagree with the author a few times, though. His overriding point throughout the post is that this is going to be hard, but don’t worry, it will end soon:

Keep in mind as you struggle through each of your sacrifices that this self-denial is only temporary. No one will expect you to keep this type of regimen up for any length of time

While this could be comforting to some, I actually feel sort of sad that we as a society need to be reassured that life is okay because we’ll get back to spoiling ourselves soon.

What if I chose to live in a state of “financial fasting” for another ten years so that I could prosper and retire early? Or what if I was living on minimum-wage and couldn’t find a way out? Would this challenge of mine really be so hard to deal with if I had to live this way always? Maybe, but it wouldn’t be unbearable. Perhaps my opinion will change once I’m a few weeks in, but I honestly don’t mind this “fasting” so much.

Of course, I also don’t think that there’s no way out of poverty, but that’s a whole other post.

Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme was discussing this same idea but in a much more “extreme” way, of course. His well-made point is that we can choose to live on nothing and work hard as long as we want to and then reap the benefits for the rest of our lives. He also makes the strong case against setting small goals, and argues for setting very big ones to strive for instead:

It sounds outrageous, but if one is trying to jump across a chasm, it makes no sense to focus on first jumping half way across and then on jumping the rest of the way. Aim to jump all the way or don’t jump at all.

But aren’t you setting yourself up for failure one might ask? Remember Yoda. There is no trying. Therefore if you are committed, there is no failure. You will eventually prevail.

PaidTwice wrote about why she feels perfection is the enemy of progress. She’s come up with her own solution - to do 90% of the busy work of a project all at once, and leave the last difficult 10% (which can sometimes take as much time to do as the first 90%) for when she has another opportunity to work on the project. This sounds very close to using the Pareto Principle, to me She says that if she sees only the big picture, though, she gets overwhelmed and never gets to the end because she gives up doing the “next step” toward the big goal.

I concur with both of their points of view. If you read through both of their posts, you’ll see their their ultimate outlooks are the same, only they take different approaches. I feel that I can’t do anything without a “big picture” in my head, and I am I am always striving for that “quintessential” that I define for myself. But I also feel the need to break anything I do into little chunks and work toward those smaller goals one by one.

In the end, it isn’t about the small goals, it’s about the big ones, but achieving the smaller benchmarks one at a time can give us progress to measure ourselves by.

Finally, I guess I’d like to point out that neither setting big goals nor little ones will get you anywhere. It’s whether you strive for those goals or not that will determine how far you get