This week I had a great set of discussions with my friends about life goals and results. Sitting on the beach with the occasional sea-sport, biathlon or Crossfit Open the conversation many times came back to fitness and health goals. We admired how the biathlon winners have the discipline for the early morning swims and runs or how some of us keep doing burpees while noone is forcing us to do so… Many claim to want to be fit and healthy but “don’t have the time”, though admittedly will not miss a favorite TV show, the football game or several nights out at the bar…
While our goals should define how we behave, it is actually the reverse. Our daily habits eventually become our real goals. If you work out every day then your goal, obviously, is to get fit and healthy. If you host nightly beer night at your house then your real goal is to have fun with friends and decompress. Neither is good or bad – but both define different goals and definitely different results.
Goal setting is meaningless without “habit-setting”: defining the daily routine that gets us to those goals. Conversely, if we look at our daily routine we can pretty much know what our real goals are. Not the imaginary goals we harbor but the real goals we actually live. We may not like what we see but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. An elite athlete has different routine from a couch potato. They may have the same goals but that is, frankly, irrelevant.
To put it bluntly, if 80% of your daily activities are in line with your goals – you will reach them. Otherwise you won’t. We should either change our routine to match our goals or let go of the illusion of having goals that really matter to us.
What do your daily activities tell you about your real (and imaginary) goals?
