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When you set out to make goals, either general life aims or just “things to do before you die,” where do the ideas come from?
Most likely, you borrow your goal ideas from what you’ve seen and experienced.
Maybe they came from your family of origin, or your way of life growing up. You wanted to replicate what you liked as a child, and move far away from everything else. (Or perhaps somewhere in between.)
When it comes to those “things to do before you die,” perhaps you borrow from someone else’s bucket list. You know the type:
visit Paris, climb Kilimanjaro, learn a language, go skydiving, take a cross-country road trip, swim with dolphins, write a novel, ride in a hot air balloon, see the northern lights, etc.
And there’s nothing wrong with that! In fact, you could argue that some common goals rise to the top of valuable life experiences. Just because other people enjoy them doesn’t mean you can’t take pleasure in them as well.
Still, there’s value in going beyond your first instincts when it comes to setting goals. Maybe the thing you really want to do is something completely unfamiliar or unexpected!
Goals Are Like Art: It’s Good to Go Beyond the Mainstream
Most popular art forms end up with near monopolies. Top-ten artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Morgan Wallen sometimes command a majority of collective user listening on Spotify. The Nutcracker is the only ballet many people will ever see. Orchestras perform the same symphonies over and over, because that’s what people want. (And just like it’s nice to visit Paris, those popular symphonies are worth listening to. They’re just not the only symphonies.)
If you want to appreciate an art form, it’s worth diving deeper than the equivalent of the Spotify Top Ten.
Who inspired the popular artists you like, and who inspired those people, and so on? Where do different forms of art come from? How is art different in Western and Eastern traditions, and then regionally, and so on?
This type of investigation is more fruitful than just experiencing the same artists over and over. It’s fun, and you’ll learn something along the way!
So when it comes to goals—if you think about all the things you want to do, and realize that you can trace these goals back to a predictable source—could there be value in going deeper? What would you do if you eliminated all your current goals and decided to start fresh?
Are your goals yours, or have you taken on someone else's?
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