In Twenty Years, What Do You Want to Remember?

In setting goals, we usually look at the next day, week, year, 5 years, lifetime. We think about what we want to accomplish during those time periods, what milestones we want to meet, what changes we want to create in ourselves and our world. Wendy Piersall does at great job of explaining how to set smart goals in Plan a 2007 You Can Be Proud Of.

Before you set your goals, take a step back and think about what you really want to accomplish in your life. I’ve talked about this in How to Define and Implement Goals and Your Mission in Life. We all have at least one mission in life, themes that we can see as we look back over what we’ve done in the past. You may be conscious of your mission, or you may not, but it is always there.

You want your goals to be meaningful and satisfying. You don’t want to waste any more time and energy than you have to achieving goals that turn out to give you all the soul-satisfaction of doing dishes or cleaning the cat’s litter box. These type of things are necessary, part of the emphemera that is needful in any life, but will they be what you remember in twenty years?

Turn the question around. Look back over the last week, year, 5 years, 20 years. Do your strongest memories relate to the goals you were working on? Do the goals you started with have the same importance in your mind that they did when you first set out to accomplish them? In some cases they will, but in other cases you’ll not even remember them or you may wonder what ever possessed you to see them as a worthwhile use of time.

Imagine yourself twenty years older than you are now, looking back over your life. What do you see? What do you remember? What gives you the most satisfaction? What warms your heart? Often we look differently at the importance of what we’re planning if we think of remembering it, rather than trying to do it.

In twenty years, what do you want to remember?

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