You Need To Plan Good Questions Not Goals
Finding a different way to your year’s purpose
This year find a different way to your life’s purpose. Let go of the approach of setting goals, embrace questions lived and enrich your life’s purpose.
Whether it is a short-term goal that is too easily obtained or a long-term goal that is out of reach, goals lack the energy and excitement to engage your soul.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Rainer Maria Rilke
Goals are best left for a game of sport. Your life is not a sport. It is more than a tally of check marks or ticks on a sheet. It needs to be lived as the beauty of the sum of all things — of deeper things.
Questions prompt us to an answer. Life questions need to prompt you to live answers. Ask good enough questions and the living of these questions is a life’s purpose.
Gary Keller in his book The One Thing writes
The quality of any answer is directly determined by the quality of the question. Ask the wrong question and get the wrong answer. Ask the right question, get the right answer. Ask the most powerful question possible, and the answer can be life altering.
Powerful Questions
Keller goes on to write that the best question is “What’s the One Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
Within his thesis on finding the One Thing, this question provides his focus and is appreciated. However, a life examined and well-lived has many other questions that can be lived into a purposeful life.
These may include:
- What do you want to be most proud of at the end of your days?
Imagine living this question. As you rise and live your best answer for this question, you have to do what is dearest to you, what makes you the proudest. It recognizes that time is finite — it prompts you to action.
2. If nothing was an obstacle, not time, not money, nor any excuses, what could you do with your one life and why would this matter?
This question is so hard to answer as the obstacles will hold you back and then having to have the answer, why it matters, increases the complexity. However, stop and just imagine the multitude of answers you could live to this question.
3. “Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have. ” Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
None of us are getting out of this alive! What the right things are is yours to live. That is the beauty in this question, learning to live your right things.
4. How have you actioned your values for the day?
If you are kind, what answer did you live today to demonstrate that? How will you live an entire life answering this question through everyday actions? How will that influence you and the quality of your life?
Final Thought
Questions beg to be lived and answered in the unfolding of your life. They offer a different way to create a beautiful year and beautiful life. Deeper than goals — more rewarding in the journey and not the accomplishing.
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