Why You Should Stop Setting Goals and Start Thinking Like a King
Goal-setting is for peasants — Kings have visions!
Goal-setting is the mecca of self-help. But is there a better way?
Having goals comes with a series of covered-up risks. Kings know this so they avoid thinking in absolutes and opt for a holistic, non-sucker way of thinking. This approach flows with the randomness of reality and factors in our faulty biology.
It leaves time as your only bottleneck to success and avoids the unnecessary and extreme risks that goals often expose you to.
The extremely dark side of goal-setting
The problem with fixed goals is that when we don’t hit them, in our minds, our efforts are wasted, and we feel like losers.
It’s baked into our nature.
We feel the pain of loss twice as intensively as the equivalent pleasure of gain. It’s called Loss Aversion. We are wired to be this way, making goal-setting an extremely taxing business on our mental health.
I know this firsthand.
I set myself the goal of writing over 200 articles last year, but I’ve managed to write only 100. In my mind, it was every bit of a failure. Regardless of the extreme positive changed to me that happened in that year, from writing 100 articles to skyrocketing my sleep to falling in love with creativity!
Goals narrow our vision and blind us to the often beautiful unknown.
Imagine you’re out on a date.
If you’re too fixated on your “Hubby/Wifey material”, you won’t be able to see the other person for who they are and build a genuine connection.
After a dozen relationships over the past 10 years, I can confidently say that I found my partner for life. Spoiler alert: She is almost nothing like I wished. If I was so stuck up on my “preferences”, I wouldn’t have given her a chance.
Needless to say, I am so glad that I didn’t let my goals run me over.
Most of us don’t know what we want, so this overconfidence in “wanting what we want and nothing else” can make us miss out on what we might love.
Takeaways:
- Goals don’t take into account a wiggle room for life’s plan
- Goals don’t take into account the positive changes towards that goal
- Goals prevent us from exploring what is better for us
How does a king think in comparison?
Kings don’t have targets; they have visions.
They judge the success of these visions by the range of accomplishments that happen towards that vision.
Say a king wants more greens to be produced in his kingdom. He doesn’t set a fixed number of tonnes to be produced in a specific year but creates an environment that makes that change happen.
Say.. incentivizing scientists to collaborate with farmers and develop stronger crops, creating a “Greenmarket,” or even fixing country roads and infrastructure.
In short, they create the ideal circumstances for the desired goal to happen organically.
Say you want to add 10 kg of weight…
That would be a goal so a king would turn that into a vision, namely:
A robust and sustainable healthy lifestyle, transformed through dedication to fitness and good nutrition.
Now, everything you do towards that vision is a success, from prepping your meals, hitting the gym, and sustaining a calorie surplus to encouraging others to join in!
You can’t do all that and not be on the path toward adding 10kg. This approach leaves only time as the bottleneck.
Rule your kingdom like a king.
Think of yourself as a king ruling over your kingdom.
We all have dreams and goals, but life can’t be squeezed into tiny boxes to tick off — It’s about setting the course that allows some wiggle room for life’s own plan.
The next time you want to set a goal, think like a king and formulate your vision instead.
Thanks for reading!
Here are some of the stories mentioned I mentioned above if you want to read more:
