How to get what you want in life

Just have a goal in mind

This might sound cheesy, but surfing changed my life.

Why?

I lived in Germany many years ago and convinced a friend to learn surfing. We booked a surf trip to Portugal, and I immediately fell in love and went on many more such trips.

After some time, however, I figured that surfing a couple of weeks a year wasn’t cutting it.

I somewhat unconsciously set this goal to someday live by the sea.

From then on, every little activity was geared towards that goal. I didn’t notice it much initially, but it became clear in hindsight.

I started working for a big international corporation, told them I wanted to live in a different country, seized the first opportunity, and soon found another one in Australia…

I’ve lived by the ocean for five years and can’t imagine returning to anything else.

Hindsight Bias

Looking back, I can see many more such events and how they have driven me towards doing something. In most cases, the goals appeared or were set somewhat unconsciously long before they were attainable.

In one case, I thought driving a company car one day would be cool. At the time, I was finishing my apprenticeship and working for a company where this was nearly impossible.

With the bias of hindsight, I can see that my life has been full of these events.

I somewhat unconsciously think of what I want to achieve in five years.

Something I want for my life and deem very important.

Consequently, every little day-to-day activity is geared towards achieving this goal.

This doesn’t happen on a conscious level.

I don’t get up in the morning now and think, ‘I want to live wherever I want and work whenever I want,` so I must do X.

No, it’s more like I orientate it towards that subconscious goal whenever a decision is made.

Shifting the Goalpost

When I started writing about Tokenomics, I didn’t do this to start a business. I did it to learn about crypto projects and potentially invest and profit from them (which aligns with the goal).

If my goal had been to be a C-Suite-Exec at SAP one day, I would have done things differently.

What I mean by this is that you keep the goal over time but figure out different ways to get there.

I first thought it would be writing paid articles, then figured freelance consulting would be cool, freelance software dev, or becoming a software business owner.

All of these somehow lead to achieving the goal.

It’s never a straight line. One needs persistence and perseverance to survive setbacks and keep going. But if your goal doesn’t change, you should be able to continue working towards it.

New Goals

When I arrived in Australia, lived by the sea, and surfed daily, I knew I had achieved my goal.

What next? I wasn’t sure. I somehow fell into this hole. Not in a negative way, but I just enjoyed myself and didn’t immediately have a new goal. After some time, however, I came up with something new.

You can do this more systematically to avoid falling into this hole. A thing I’ve read about is journaling about your long-term life goals once in a while.

I don’t do it because I somehow like how things have been going so far, and maybe my mind is very driven, and I don’t need it, but it might be helpful for others.

This might not be news to you.

You might already know this, but this was a cool revelation for me. You can achieve a goal over time by simply wanting it and working hard. I bet many of you will have similar memories of setting goals and achieving them.

IF NOT, you should try it. Some people recommend to write them down. You could write down your 5-year, 10-year life goal? This can be very broad. The important part is to think about and manifest this idea of where you want to be. In most cases, this will be very abstract, such as ‘live wherever I want, work whenever I want.’

As always, I’m certainly not the first to discover this. Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Tim Ferriss, Napoleon Hill, etc., have written books about this.