Thursday, March 11, 2010

Failure?

Goals. We set them to achieve a variety of things. We set daily goals, weekly, and even yearly goals. Often our goals are multiple faceted.


Working toward goals can be very beneficial. It gives us purpose and direction. What happens when we have to change our goals? If we don't complete our goals are we failures? Are we less than we were before?

To answer those questions, we have to look at what goals are, and why we set them. Goal are set by us to achieve something. We aim to complete a task, or change our lives in someway. We set goals to give us direction and motivation. Goals give us a way to mark our progress. If we don't know where we are going, we can't see from where we come.


We set goals for the future. However, we have one problem—we don't know what the future holds. We can plan, but there are things which are out of our control. There are accidents, illness, equipment failure, and many other factors, that we have no knowledge or control.

The best thing about setting goals is modifying them along the way. As the future arrives, we have to evaluate our goals and continue to change it make it relevant for today. We may accomplish our goal earlier than planned, or realize that the goal we set is unrealistic or unhealthy.
As we evaluate our goal
we look at what we accomplished,
where we wanted to be and
how we plan to accomplish our goal.

Not completing a goal because we've modified, does not make us a failure. Rather very smart. Each goal needs to be continually modified.
Not completing a goal because of injury or illness, does not make us a failure. Rather we must look at our goal and modify it to fit our new limits.
If a goal is not reached because of unforeseen circumstances does not make a person a failure. Rather we can move forward with a new goal from the position we find ourselves.

The only person who fails is the one who doesn't set a goal and work on achieving that goal. Or the one who stops setting goals simply because they had to modify a goal.

Goals are to motivate us. If we lose heart and give up forever, than we have to evaluate our original goals. We can't stop everything because we didn't accomplish the ultimate goal. We have to keep sight of what we did accomplish and realize that we did well on what we did finish.

Creating a positive day is a daily goal. And often it's accomplished not by what I do, but rather by seeing God at work or how others grow. Creating a positive life is done one day at a time... it's a goal to work on each and every day.