One of the best ways to be miserable is to relinquish your goals altogether, thus becoming utterly directionless. But if, like many people, misery is not your only goal, then you can dissatisfy yourself with the way you approach your various missions.
Goal setting involves the creation of two categories of ambition. Ultimate goals are the end points of the process: learning Spanish, having a tidy garage, settling on a career, completing a school program, creating a social network, bench pressing two hundred pounds. Ask people about their own goals, and virtually everything they say will be an ultimate goal.
Immediate goals are the small steps in service to an ultimate goal. So if your ultimate goal is to complete your income tax form, then spending twenty minutes gathering the paperwork might be your first immediate goal. If the ultimate goal is to move to Scranton, an immediate goal might be to visit a real estate website for that city.
The cause of misery is well served by failure. So it’s important to ignore the so-called SMART rules, which dictate that effective immediate goals should be:
These rules make success more likely, resulting in increased motivation and interest in the succeeding steps. This only means that you will be more likely to get up off that comfortable couch and continue working on your project. Instead, make all of your immediate goals VAPID:
Regardless of whether you set SMART or VAPID immediate goals, you can ensure disappointment by—as usual—the simple expedient of following the injunctions of the culture. In this case, keeping your eye on the ball.
Set your ultimate goal (say, to find a long-term relationship), break it down into smaller steps (join the rowing club, accept the invitation to the departmental party, purchase non-droopy underwear), and then, no matter what happens with those immediate goals, continue to hold your attention relentlessly on the ultimate goal. Am I married yet?
Most ultimate goals are a long way off—hence the need to break them down into smaller steps. You might achieve them only once, and only after a great deal of effort. If you allow yourself to focus on the immediate goals, you will frequently find that you have succeeded. Hey, look—I actually smiled at the cute barista. This runs the risk of increasing your enthusiasm for the path you have created for yourself.
Instead, by stubbornly attending to the ultimate goal (Have I got a partner yet?), the discouraging answer (Well, no) will recur again and again and again. If there are fifty steps in the process, you will get forty-nine identical answers of “not yet.” You can maintain the aura of failure for almost the entire journey. And because this continual discouragement will degrade your interest and motivation, you are likely to give up long before you reach the success of your ultimate goal, thus making the sense of failure permanent.