Achievements, Goals, Gratitude and Happiness

Peter Wright

Achievements and success are necessary to find happiness according to most gurus.

Success

But are they?

I had another topic in mind for today’s post until I reviewed this blog’s statistics and I noticed a trend.

There is a rising level of interest in goals.

On 11 June 2012, I published a post titled “6 key values for achieving goals”

It is one of my most popular posts. 1912 visitors have landed on it since it was published. The trend I noticed shows that from an average number of annual visits of around 230 in the early years after it was published, there were 571 visits in 2017 and 151 in the first 10 weeks of 2018.

I don’t promote old posts at all, I email new posts to subscribers and mention them on social media. I send out a link to this blog itself a couple of times a week. Visitors to older posts are generally getting there through a search engine.

We usually want to read about achievements, goals, goal setting after the Christmas holidays and in early January, when we think about our plans for the New Year. When the media is full of tips and ideas for New Year’s Resolutions.

So why does there seem to be more interest in goals?

Is it because more of us are searching for happiness?

Are many of us falling into the trap of believing that we need to be successful, to reach our goals so that our achievements allow us to buy things that we believe will make us happy?

If we are, we will find that happiness will be fleeting. A temporary illusion. On 2 February 2018, I wrote a little about the Prosperity Paradox here. The full story behind that post is in Chapter 13 of my book 5 Steps To Thriving On Adversity.

Achievements and Gratitude

I subscribe to a short daily motivational video message called DarrenDaily by Darren Hardy

It’s a three to six-minute video that is emailed every weekday morning.

In today’s video, Darren spoke about goals and how for many the conventional approach to setting and attaining goals works against us.

His point is that until we start from a place of being grateful for what we do have – no matter how little that may seem to be – we will always focus on what we lack. Focusing on lack is a sure way to failing to meet our goals.

He is right, I know from personal experience that being resentful of the situation I was in when I came to Canada to start a new life kept me from making any achievements. Only when I became grateful for being in a safe country with no one trying to attack me and with no shortages of basic commodities did I start to make progress.

Perhaps I should go back to that old post and add gratitude as a seventh ingredient for achieving goals.

Achievements and The Journey

During my life, I have had more ups and downs than most. At various times, I have enjoyed a good income, been bankrupt, financially comfortable again, separated from my home, my country and all my assets. Started again doing hard physical farm jobs. On the road to financial recovery, another setback from a heart attack. During all those periods, I have sometimes been happy and sometimes unhappy.

In my experience, there has been no clear correlation between wealth and happiness nor financial difficulty and unhappiness.

When things were falling to pieces in Zimbabwe Sue and I did not know from one day to the next whether we would still have a home the next day or even if we would still be alive. It was a deeply worrying time, but our evening rides on our horses around the farm, looking at our cattle, seeing a huge range of wildlife, inhaling the scents of the African bush, gave us intensely happy experiences.

Sunset on our farm in Zimbabwe

What has determined my level of happiness has been the thoughts I allowed to dominate my mind.

I don’t dispute that goals and achievement are important, financial success does make life easier. Freedom from worrying about paying the bills does make life less stressful. But neither of those automatically make us happier.

Happiness and contentment come from enjoying the journey and finding balance. Gratitude for the simple things, like being alive, having reasonably good health, enough to eat and a roof over my head lets me enjoy each day’s journey. It lets me work towards some important goals and live a good life.

Share your thoughts in a comment.

Success key image from Pixabay

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