July 2011

Goal-Setting for Students

In a path-breaking experiment, college students were hooked on brain machines that would tell when the student started dreaming. The moment the sleeping students started to dream they were awakened. After the first night they were found to be nervous; on the second night the students became irritable. After the third night, the students experienced serious psychological effects and the experiment had to be called off. However, within twenty-four hours everyone was normal.

The experiment brought out one significant finding. When we are asleep we need our dreams, but we must also have our dreams when we are awake. That is the only way you can be a meaningful specific.

There is a difference between dreams and goals. Dreams are like wishes or the act of thinking aloud. It is fun to think about them and it ends there. The difference between a dream and goals is action – turning dreams into a reality with detailed plans and deadlines.

Schools must prepare students to succeed in life and not just examinations. The word success is subjective and means different things to different people. To me success means contributing to the happiness and success of others, reaching my full potential, and paying back to the community. I firmly believe that happiness and self-actualization cannot happen without the help of other people.

Success does not happen by itself, by sitting on your haunches, with daddy holding your hand, scoring 100 out of 100, or being a “cool dude”. Success happens by setting goals and then pursuing them with great ferocity of purpose. That is also the secret of happiness.

Goals may be big or small; they can be about school, academics, sports, hobbies, or whatever. Goals could be short up to one month; they could be long-term even beyond one year. Irrespective of what they are, they have two things in common – desire and action. To recap, success is very subjective, success is about setting goals and achieving them, success means planning, and success means positive action.

Goals help you to prioritize – focus on what is important, and delegate the rest. According to Pareto’s Principle, only about 20% of the tasks a leader or a manger performs in any organization are vital, the other 80% are trivial. The goal-driven leader spends 80% of his time pursuing the 20% “critical few” and 20% of his time on the 80% “trivial many.”

Goals help in pursuing one’s passion. Each one of us is passionate about something in life and we can’t imagine doing anything else. Regrettably, most of us are not aware of what our true talent is, and as a result we go through life being unhappy and unaware of ourselves. Goals help you to find your passion in life and sustain it.

Pursuing goals is very demanding and can often be so frustrating that one feels like throwing in the towel. Moreover, many of your so called friends may dissuade you from continuing saying that no man ever achieved all his goals. They will give the examples of Christ, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. At these moments you have to be optimistic. The tragedy of life does not lie in not reaching your goal, the tragedy of life lies in not having a goal to reach. The journey itself can be the goal.

Like Generals go to war with a battle plan and teachers go to class with a lesson plan, leaders seek their vision with a goal plan. Without a plan you will be a dreamer.

With warm regards,

Lieutenant General (Retd) Arjun Ray, PVSM, VSM
Chief Executive Officer
Indus Trust