The Importance of Secondary Goals

In life we always hear that the key to a successful future lies in setting and accomplishing goals, we have often heard “failing to plan is planning to fail”. What we are never really taught is about the importance of having primary and secondary goals in out lives.

Primary goals are those that reflect our deepest desires, those that for some they might appear to be unattainable or extremely ambitious. These are important since they set the direction each of our decisions need to point towards in order to reach it at some point and they keep us moving forward because the reward is just too sweet in our eyes to give up. Differently, secondary goals are those that we set for ourselves in a daily basis and that give us small victories that will fuel our drives to keep going, small enough to be attainable but big enough to create a change over time. If we don’t set these small daily goals, the overwhelming feeling of our ambitious primary goals will eventually discourage us.

Setting secondary goals is an art that must be mastered, we need to set actions that will shape us in all ways possible to become better and will get us a step closer to that thing we wish to accomplish more than anything. These could be as simple as running a mile every morning, eating better, practicing a new instrument for an hour and so on. What we must be really careful of is that we don’t set the bar too high for ourselves, if we set really ambitious daily goals, if we bite more than we can chew then we will turn the possibility of having small victories making us feel more motivated into the presence of daily small fails that discourage us further and further to the point where we don’t believe un ourselves any more. So its really important that we set goals that shape us but that we know we can conquer, that put that constant stress that’s just enough to improve our character just a day at a time.