Goal-setting, happiness and success

In our busy world, we often get so caught up in the motions of life thattime gets away from us before we even realise. When we look at ourlives we’re sometimes surprised at the progress – or lack thereof – thatwe have made, with thoughts such as, “By now I should have beenpromoted/have more money/be married/own my own business,” being frequentoccupants in our heads. Whatever the benchmark of our expectations, weare notoriously bad at estimating what can done in the time we have, toquote Bill Gates “we overestimate what we can achieve in one year andunderestimate what we can do in ten”.Many of us make resolutions but too few of us set realisticallyambitious goals for ourselves. We may have dreams and big picture lifetargets such as wanting to be rich, successful or happy, and yet weoften leave it up to luck to figure out how we will achieve it. Goals help turn our dreams into reality and allow us to take control ofour direction, as opposed to leaving it up to chance. Feeling optimisticand excited about the future not only increases the likelihood ofstaying focused and motivated to achieve our goals, there’s also adirect correlation with happiness. That is, we feel happier in thecurrent moment when we are working towards clear goals.Evidence has shown that one of the most effective ways to accomplish anygoal is to develop a series of micro-goals. No matter how big yourdreams are, you can break them down into bite size, manageable chunks bysimply asking yourself, “What can I do today/this week/this month tomove me closer to my goal?” Micro-goals have three major benefits:1) No matter how big your ultimate goal is, you can start now: Do some research, send an e-mail or buy a book 2) Ticking off micro-goals one at a time helps us feel motivated and inspired to continue; and3) It forces us to prioritise and focus, pushing procrastination out of the way to get something done.So whatever you want to accomplish, do not leave it to chance. Instead,write yourself a daily, weekly and monthly list of micro-goals. Forextra motivation, write a list of all the reasons you want to accomplishit. All that’s left to do is start. * S Zuhair Naqvi is the Managing Director of DicoTech Qatar WLL, and an EMBA alumnus of HEC Paris, Class of 2016.