More than two decades ago when I was an undergrad, I joined a music class.
I liked singing, I spent a significant amount of time on singing because I wanted to become a professional singer.
I also sang a few songs on stage in various school and college programs.
Many of my contemporary friends would compliment that I sang pretty well and my voice was very smooth, and suitable for many modern sentimental songs.
Actually, similar types of words from many of my close friends also catalyzed me to pursue my music journey.
I believed at the time that music could be one of the reasons to live a purposeful life.
I used to attend music class in the evening after school.
My teacher taught me classical music very thoroughly.
My music teacher always told me to practice classical songs because he was a firm believer that classical music only produces a good vocalist.
I still think I wasn’t a bad vocal student at least, I might be an average or above student but I’m sure I wasn’t meeting my teacher’s expectations as I could imagine.
I was clearly unaware what my music teacher’s expectation looked like.
Goal is different from dream, goal is a stepwise concrete rational process of achieving something, and can only be seen when we are awake
After about six month’s music class, one day my teacher asked me a very thought provoking question.
That question was a heavy load for me to rethink my music journey.
I still to this day have no clue why he asked me such a question and what he saw on me on that day.
He asked me, “Is this singing your dream or goal?”
I didn’t know what he meant then.
I didn’t understand upfront so I was confused about what to say.
I’d heard that many of my friends used to say about their dream job, dream car, and dream house.
But I’d never heard about any goal for a house or car or job, at least by people whom I was surrounded by.
I also thought the same way and said to my teacher, “singing is my dream.”
He didn’t say anything except a silent soft laugh.
To be honest, I didn’t know the difference between dream and goal, so I told him, I wanted to become a professional singer.
I told him that I wanted to have a successful singing career, singing was my passion, it was a kind of dream but I wanted to make it come true for me.
My teacher added, “Most of the time dreams are fantasies in our life, dreams don’t come into reality because they are very volatile.
We see so many dreams at night during sleep but most of them we forget by the time we wake up in the morning.”
“But the goal is different, it is a stepwise concrete rational process of achieving something.
Goal is not a dream, goal is something we can only see when we are awake,” my teacher further added.
Small tasks matter the most to achieve any big goal in life, if small tasks are done consistently over time, we will achieve the big goal, it’s only a matter of time
I didn’t respond to anything he said except I greeted him and said, “bye”.
This was my last conversation with my music teacher, after that I never returned to the music class.
I still to this day don’t know why I didn’t return to the music class because I wasn’t offended by what he said.
Brian Tracy, CEO of Brian Tracy International and author of ‘Goals‘ said, “Write down your goals, make plans to achieve them, and work on your plans every single day.”
Absolutely, I wasn’t doing what Brain Tracy said. I talked about this conversion to one of my journalist friends at college the next day.
My friend told me, “Dreams may come from your goal too, but you have to pass the goal line.”
I asked him, “What is ‘goal line’?”
What he said about the ‘goal line’ on that day stuck in my life through today.
My friend made me understand what goal is and what dream is.
Goal itself is also just imagination if we keep this inside us but if we take action and finish one to two percent of the goal then we pass the ‘goal line’.
Our goal could be anything but we must finish at least one to two percent of it in the beginning, if we want to see our goal in our dream.
My friend added, “Dreams disappear in the morning, but goals reappear in the morning.”
Disappearing means it is gone from us but reappearing means it keeps coming back in more visible form.
We never visualize the dream in the morning, we never try to remember.
But all the successful people always visualize their goals.
Tony Robbins, the author of ‘Life Force‘ said, “Goal setting is a visualization process to make impossible possible, but always stepwise.”
When we have the habit of visualizing the goal, we don’t have to compete with others, we will compete for ourselves, and also win for ourselves.
Winning to yourself is the best win ever.
My journalist friend said, “once you finish the one to two percent goal line, you create the habit to anticipate more than to react. This is really important for any kind of goal in life.”
In ‘The 4 Disciplines of Execution‘ the author Chris McChesney gives a simple, repeatable formula for executing our most important priorities. They are focus on one important task, action on it, maintain a scoreboard, and create a sense of accountability.
Chris McChesney said, “In determining our most important goal, don’t ask what’s most important; instead, begin by asking if every other area of our operation remained at its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?”
My journalist friend gave me a very simple example of how any change work out when we process any goal in life and how the one to two percent goal line works.
He shared his goal of being healthy in life by adopting this technique.
He told me, “I always start the day by drinking two glasses of water in the morning immediately after I wake up.
When I drink two glasses of water immediately after I wake up, I win over my dehydrated body that gives energy to win my day.
This is a very small task but worth doing every single day if I want to become healthy. This is my one percent goal line for the day.”
Keep in mind, small tasks matter the most to achieve any big goal in life.
If small tasks are done consistently over time, we will achieve the big goal, it’s only a matter of time.
Drinking two glasses of water right after we wake up is the first step that we are ready to battle the day.
It also provides a sense of confidence to us, because this is another indication that we love our healthy body which is our incredible machine in this life.
It’s so easy to snooze the button and sleep five more minutes rather than go to the kitchen and drink two glasses of water.
Once we get up and move out of bed, it is less likely that we come back to bed to sleep again.
This is another advantage to make a habit of early rising to benefit from a miracle morning.
Happiness is an unseen but inner felt emotion which comes gradually while moving towards any goal in life with consistency
In the classic ‘Atomic Habits‘, the author James Clear said, “The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of our identity, success is the product of daily habits; not once in a lifetime transformations.”
A tiny habit looks like a small task but many of us rarely do it, for example walking to the kitchen to drink water is an initiation step for our goal that needs some mental energy to begin.
Going from bed to kitchen is a motion that produces energy.
Drinking water is an action, remember, action produces emotion and that is what drives us to accomplish any of our life goals.
Truth to be told, the majority of human population don’t drink enough water during the day, not because of any specific reasons, but only due to our busy schedule.
We forget to drink at home, at work, everywhere.
Many of our everyday discomforts like headache, dizziness, tiredness, mental fog also happen due to dehydration in our body.
Research shows that the majority of kidneys, liver, and brain diseases start due to dehydration in our body in the very beginning.
Drinking two glasses of water immediately after we wake up is less than a minute task, but it changes life if done consistently everyday by forming a habit.
The consistency in action is the first step to achieve any life goal whatever small the action might be.
To make our body and mind healthy, we don’t have to do big and difficult tasks but we have to do small tasks everyday regularly.
No matter what life is a battle of winning small things everyday.
We all want to be happy, we all know what we need to do to become happy and healthy.
We’ve read about how to be happy and healthy, we’ve seen about it in books and movies, we think we know how the happiness steps work in our life.
But the problem is we never make a concrete goal to achieve it and take action consistently.
We have no idea how the ‘goal line’ works in the case of our happiness.
If we don’t do anything small consistently everyday related to the big goal then we don’t have any goal, and if we don’t have any goal then we never experience satisfaction and happiness.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s theory of ‘Flow‘ pretty much says that happiness is the internal feeling of satisfaction of doing something regularly.
I believe inconsistency is what my music teacher realized and saw in me when I was doing music class. I was not consistent in any of my music work.
Happiness is an unseen but inner felt emotion which releases gradually while moving towards any goal in life with consistency.
Purposeful silence with a quiet mind heals the body permanently but current medication heals the body temporarily
Having a goal is like starting a house with a single brick you know nothing about in the beginning, but eventually a house is made.
Happiness is like how it feels by making the house one step closer everyday.
But, having a dream is a little different as we know it, we’ve read it, and we’ve seen it, but unfortunately, never translating it into reality.
The problem is every night a new dream appears and vanishes in the morning.
In my view, goal of being healthy, happy, and wealthy should never be complicated.
Complication is in our physical and mental laziness.
Complication is in our only thinking habit but never to start anything.
Complication is in our only saying ‘I’ll do it’ but never doing it.
Complication is in our postponing habit, I’ll do it tomorrow, next week, and next year, but it never appears.
Complication is in our procrastination habit by consciously choosing to put off the most important tasks.
We don’t want to spend two minutes on small but important things everyday early in the morning right after we wake up which passes our ‘goal line’ for the day.
Drinking one glass of water takes less than 1 minute.
Early meditation to clear our mind takes less than five minutes.
Research says that meditation is a purposeful silence which is way more powerful than busy, hectic, and rush in life.
Busy, hectic, and rush are common words in our everyday life.
These words have been created by our own habits, people around us, and personal choices.
Our life is way more important than these few selected buzzing words that we throw around all the time.
If we play the busyness game only on the treadmill and never learn how to put a ladder, then we reach nowhere. We make a circle over and over again and end up in the same place in life.
Purposeful silence with a quiet mind heals the body permanently but current medication heals the body temporarily.
One of the books that I’ve read and reread about purposeful silence is Marcus Aurelius‘s ‘Meditation‘. In Marcus words, “Do not waste the remainder of your life in thoughts about others, when you do not require these thoughts. Begin your morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the meddling, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”
Like meditation, stretching our body early in the morning takes less than 2 minutes which regulates our metabolic activity and blood circulation.
Not only that, by stretching our body or by doing little physical workout, we also enter into a little higher state of mind where our thinking becomes different than before to start the physical workout.
But we never try to understand and take advantage of the simple science power behind physical exercise because we are in a rush, we don’t have time to do it.
All of these small tasks take a maximum of 5 minutes and this is what gives a healthy, happy, and wealthy life in the long run.
Whatever weird the goal is, if we stick to the goal and battle the small humps everyday, we will win the race.
I don’t know how this system works but the result appears automatically once we are in the process.
I believe this is how any of our life goals translates into reality, slowly but surely.
People without goals are more likely to be depressed at some stage in life and generally have terrible mornings with buzz because their mind is relatively quiet in the morning.
Quietness is the enemy for those who are depressed in life.
They have to bring stuff from the past, maybe from the previous day or a few days before to run their mind.
They also don’t sleep at night because their mind is constantly buzzing from the whole day’s activities or by old past activities.
They never practice how to clear their head before going to bed or in the morning after they wake up.
Depression generally happens when we focus more on us rather than our meaningful goal.
Chris Bailey, the author of ‘Hyperfocus‘ talks about how to get your brain to focus in his TedTalk. His talk revolves around how our ability to focus is the key to productivity, creativity, and living a meaningful life.
Conclusion
Once we have a goal in life with focus mind, things run smoothly and we are less likely to have a depressed mind.
Our days and nights run very smoothly.
We sleep well at night.
And ultimately, this is the secret of our happiness.
When you have a goal, when you sleep well at night, when you become healthy, you learn how to reduce time on things that you hate the most.
This habit automatically generates more time on things you love the most.
Remember, who you are is what your goal is.
Goal is not what we know, what we tell others, and what our plan is, the goal is what we do everyday consistently.
In the end, the goal of a goal is to change it into a smooth system and live a happy life.
James Clear in ‘Atomic Habits‘ says “Goals are about the results you want to achieve, systems are about the processes that lead to those results.”
By the way I’m so thankful to my music teacher for such a thought provoking question that helped me to shed my life.
Thank you teacher.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”
