The Benefit of Less: Why You Need Less Goals Not More In Life

"Less is more.” or “Quality over quantity.” The saying goes well beyond our materialistic desires. In life, few things are actually important, rest is simply noise, things that distract or drag us down. This is especially true for our so-called ‘life goals’. You do not need ten or twenty things to change your life, just 2 or 3 things are enough. However, most people would rather drown themselves in their own goals and ambitions. You do see this frequently in the productivity or self-improvement spaces, right? People trying desperately to kickstart progress and get their life on track, only to find themselves chained to the idea of productivity or growth or success. You see their ambitions turn into their shackles, something that chains them to ‘progress’. But that’s not even the worst part. Often, they find that most of those goals never come true or they find themselves abandoning most of them. So, is having less goals really the solution? And more importantly, how can we do that? That’s what this article will be centered around.

I do want to stress that less does not mean small here. You should not conflate the two. Your goals should always be centered around changing your life. This means ‘getting a degree or a skill’ or ‘working for that promotion’ or ‘building your relations’ or ‘starting a new business’, not ‘making bed’ or ‘skipping tv or youtube before bed’. If you truly want to change life for the better, focus on things that actually leave a huge mark on your life. Now, let’s move on with our topic.

Here, the ‘Why’ part is quite obvious, right? Less things means less to do; less resources and less effort to be used. But still, this goes a bit deeper than that. Let’s go over them point by point:

• Less expectations and pressure for success

Our goals and ambitions are driven by our expectations; The desire for change and growth in life. But shouldn’t we have more expectations in life? Well, not really. I know that sounds counter-intuitive but here’s the thing about expectations, not all of them turn true or end up how we expect. Tbh, very few turn into reality and even fewer are actually how we expect them to be. So, piling up too many expectations will actually lead to higher chances of failures or disappointments, which in turn can lead to self-doubt, lower self-esteem and make you question your capabilities. Again, I do not mean to imply that we should never dream big or have big ambitions but we need to be realistic and set a limit to our expectations, based on our current reality and how much setbacks or disappointments we can bear or tolerate.

Furthermore, more goals means more pressure for success. Have you ever experienced this: the more things we have to achieve, the greater the pressure to succeed? We literally get chained to our success. We tend to seek meaning and purpose only through success. We define our existence based on how productive we are. Imagine evaluating your entire self-worth based on how much work you did today. At that point, we are no longer human but machine.

• Your ambitions won’t turn into burdens

Burdens are in some way also responsibilities right? Things we have to do. But our ambitions and goals are a product of our desire for growth and change. These two are incompatible. You do not go to the gym everyday just because you have to keep yourself healthy, you do it largely because you are motivated by how good you look and feel. You like the feeling of being confident in your body. That’s a desire not some obligation. Human beings are not motivated by duty but by desire. To understand more on this, read my ‘Habits vs. Discipline: Why You Need Habits For Long Term Success And Easy Growth?’.

When you have too much to achieve, the ‘want’ turns into ‘need’. You now have to do a lot, just to get the feeling of being productive or useful. Tell me, which feels more fulfilling and easy to do? Completing 5 goals per year or 15 goals per year. The latter feels more like baggage, something you would want to get rid of as fast as possible. Plus, we all know how our focus and willpower worsen when we ‘have to do’ not ‘want to do’. Not to mention, the burn out you feel and the depletion of your limited resources, which further lowers the quality of your work. So, if you want to excel at your ambitions and chase it with all your heart, to the best of your abilities, try focusing only on the important ones, which there are, often, very few.

• Less goals means less failures or setbacks

I can imagine what you’re thinking reading this part. Not something you would expect in an article about growth and success right? Set less goals just to avoid failure? But there’s a reason why I am saying this. I don’t think I need to remind you that most of our goals or ambitions never come true. It’s one of the reasons why people give up on their dreams. We experience more failures and disappointments than success. There are more dips in the chart of life than ups. And this is what we need to avoid.

Our failures have a toll on our mental health. Did you know that continued failure and setbacks can actually reduce testosterone in men? The hormone that plays a key role in winning and success. Failure merely does not mean wasted effort, resources, time and willpower, failure also means self-doubt, lower self-esteem, self-criticism, mental stress, feeling of sadness and so on. If you fail more than you succeed, you will eventually stop trying because of the suffering it brings and how it damages your confidence and trust in yourself. We all know that feeling of wanting to keep going, when we’re good at something, right? Like that video game you were so good at. The opposite is also true. The more we lose, the faster we want to give up or abandon. So, if losing is inevitable, why not lose less? Why not lose 2 out of 5 times rather than 10 out of 15 times? And more importantly, why not lose when chasing things that actually matter? This is why I want you to set as few goals as possible, goals that actually have life-changing implications.

• Quality over quantity

This is very straight forward, so I won’t be going too deep. When you focus on too many things, a lot of noise gets mixed in. These are nothing more than distractions. Again, there are very few things in life that actually matter. You need to set less goals because that will force you to only prioritize the important stuff. If you do not set a limit or set a limit too high, your goals will be diluted with menial tasks. We’ve all seen people’s new year’s resolutions right? A lot of important stuff like ‘getting a job or a degree’ or ‘getting sober’ mixed with very minor things like ‘making the bed’ or ‘not watching mobile before bed time’ or ‘reading more books’. Now, I don’t mean to say the smaller things are not important. But they should be obvious. What’s worse is, often, they will overtake your bigger goals since they are easier to do, making you lose track of things that matter. But If you are forced to set only 5 goals per year, you’ll not even think about the menial things and get straight to the life-changing ones. Always remember “quality over quantity”.

• Less makes you adaptive

Again, we have already discussed how very few expectations come true in life. Things rarely go as we expect or plan them to. And to deal with that, we need to be flexible and adaptive. Read my ‘Things Never Go As Planned: How To Deal With It’ to learn more. When we have too much, we are forced to spread our focus and attention. And what happens when we face unexpected events or changes? Everything starts to fall apart. You are overloaded with more than you can handle. You will desperately try to adjust but end up failing at everything. If it's just one or two things, you can adapt pretty easily. But if it’s 10, then you will seriously be paralyzed.

Let me try to explain this with an example: Say you set 10 goals to complete in the next 3 months. Now, you already need to spread out your attention, energy, time and resources. If only 3 out of 10 goals are going as planned (3 is a safe bet), there are 7 other things you need to adapt to. Say you’re having difficulty ‘sleeping and walking up in time’. If you try to adjust the time you wake up, you might end up being late for work or be forced to skip your workout routine. If you try to move your morning task to the evening, you might need to compromise on other things like your interactions with friends or skipping one of your hobbies after work. See how even one thing starts to harm another then another. Now imagine, it’s not just ‘sleeping and walking up on time’, it’s also ‘cooking food at home’, ‘going to the library’, ‘working on your startup or business’,... You see where I am going with this. You can’t adapt to everything. At some point, things will start to fall and then you become paralyzed.

• Don't bite off more than you can chew

Quite obvious right? Chew more than you can handle, you will end up spitting everything back. A crucial thing to be aware of, when setting goals, is ensuring you have enough time, willpower and resources. If you decide you want to read more books, go to the gym everyday, cook everyday, learn a new skill every month, and socialize more, you will quickly burn out and also end up giving up on most of these things. But if you focus on only two, say going to the gym and socializing more, you will realize things become smooth and easy. Again, we have limited willpower, attention, energy, time and so on. We need to be smart on how to allocate them and invest them carefully in a way that gives us the most ROI.

Before I end this article, I do want to give some tips and tricks on how we can set less goals; This is a problem and it makes no sense to talk about it if we are not looking for a solution, right? And, believe me, this is not as easy as it seems. There’s a reason why most people get overwhelmed by their own goals and ambitions because they do not realize that they are taking on more than they can handle. So how to set a limit to the number of goals you set? Let’s go over this point by point:

• Don’t beat yourself up

Often, the need to overperform stems from a feeling of self-doubt or incompetence. In order to prove it wrong, we tend to take on everything at once, especially when most things in our life are not going as we want them to. This transforms into a long list of goals we expect to finish in a month or two. But things take time and we are not invincible. So changing your mindset and learning how to not be so tough on yourself is the first step. You can be tough on yourself when you have zero goals and a life that is not satisfying. But there’s a limit to everything. So, next time you get fired up to change your life, be kind to yourself and start slow, and aim for steady growth. You especially do not need to self-criticize or beat yourself for not being able to change your life overnight.

• Focus on the big picture

Always focus on the big picture i.e. things that will have a massive impact on your life. Learning how to filter out the important from the distractions and prioritizing your ambitions based on your current scenario is necessary. Even things that you think are important like learning a new skill, will seem irrelevant when you realize you’ll never use the skill. It is good to learn a new language if your dream is to travel or use it in your job for communication or want to study in a new country. But learning a new language just for the sake of learning is not good. It is good to read more books if you are a researcher or an article writer. Reading a book just for the sake of reading and never using its knowledge is just a waste of your time and effort. Always ask yourself what is the end goal. This will help you separate the signal from the noise.

• Have short deadlines (Ideally 3 months)

Deadlines are important for quite a number of reasons. They help you get into action, stimulate a sense of urgency and divert your attention to where it should be. But deadlines can also help you ensure you set less goals. Setting quick deadlines (3 months is ideal in my view) will make you realize that you won’t be able to finish a lot in such a short time, hence keeping your list short. Furthermore, short deadlines also mean less time for things to go south i.e. little will change in 3 months. The more time you set, the more chances of you having to deal with unexpected turn of events. Again, read my ‘Things Never Go As Planned: How To Deal With It’ for more on this. Finally, with short deadlines, things keep moving. You finish things quicker or fail at them. So you can spot which things work and which don’t. You can keep adding new goals after completing old ones while not overwhelming yourself.

• Calculate the Return on Investment

ROI is crucial in every aspect of our life. Although a lot of things we do rarely give us the results we desire, doing a cost-benefit analysis and calculating roi will ensure you filter out minor and menial things. You will only focus on the high impact goals. Now, whether the roi of a goal is worth it or not, is something only you can decide. But doing a quick roi will help you prioritize your goal and filter out the distractions or noise. Surely, goals like ‘get a degree’ or ‘get a promotion’ or ‘increase your share portfolio’ are way more important than ‘learn a new language’ or ’learn a new hobby’. Again, the goals themselves are not bad, but these types of things tend to create distraction by giving you a wrong idea that you being pre-occupied is somehow making progress.

In conclusion, when you set less goals for yourself, you focus on the meaningful things, avoid burn out (both mentally and physically), be better at allocating your resources (time, energy, money, willpower and so on), be more adaptive, aren’t chained to your expectations, and so on. All of these things not only boost your overall productivity but also increase your chance of success and bring real change in life. Your life becomes so much simpler and natural as you aren’t constantly trying to control every single detail or aspect. You let the minor things handle themselves while you maintain your focus on the important stuff. I recommend setting just 5-6 goals per year and then breaking them down into an Action Plan with a 3 month deadline. Read my ‘Action Plan 101: Create The Perfect Strategy To Become More Productive And Successful’ to learn how to be better at creating an Action Plan. This is very practical and realistic, and will help you be motivated, fuel your momentum and boost your overall success rate. So the next time you use blueprint, remember setting less goals is better.