When we set our goals, we set milestones to achieve them. milestones are those that help us to achieve our goals. When we look at the broader view in our journey of life, what exactly are goals? How it helps us to lead our life better? Achieving goals are not only the purpose of life. There will always be higher purposes to work for and that is never going to end even after our death. Achieving visions that we stand for takes more than a lifetime and there are people where their visions are achievable at least for them. It is all about what we think and differs from person to person and their broader perspectives.
In this life, there are 4 kinds of feelings and so does for our vision. Vision is the longest and ultimate purpose of life to lead our lives. What do we need to do to reach there? Visions are hard to reach but anyone can dream about ti infinite lengths. For example, I have a vision of unlocking all the secrets and mysteries of the universe. Achieving this is impossible for me alone, if 7 billion minds come together to solve the mystery of the universe, the probability of achieving it will become higher.
Visions can be self-interested or mutual between people or can be a collective effort. Just to make things simple and intuitive, I divided vision into 4 steps i.e Milestones, Goals, Mission & Vision. For everyone to reach their visions, one can follow this technique of dividing into 4. This idea was inspired by the podcast On Purpose by Jay Shetty when he was interviewing Mike Posner. In his podcast, he mentioned that goals are changing in the lives of people but mission becomes the higher purpose of achieving. For Example, I want to become a millionaire in 6 months is a goal. Considering to help people for your whole life after you become a millionaire can be a mission.
Self-interested visions are like looking at yourself when you are at the position of unstoppable. You can set your vision of becoming a philosopher and inspiring millions of people to change their lives so that world can be a better place — is a vision that can be achieved by only you and collective efforts of others is not required to achieve that — you can read, learn and gain experience and by that, you can get near to achieve your vision.
Let’s walkthrough about the 4 steps of vision that we need to understand and this helps to gain confidence in achieving our visions.
Milestones:
Milestones are those that are short-term and can help us reach our goals. Dividing goals into several milestones help us to achieve goals rather quicker than having a goal without milestones. Consider you have a goal to change your job in 6 months. To change your job within that period, you have to do some certain tasks to make sure you seem interested to other recruiters. If you break the goal into certain specific small tasks like updating your CV, making your LinkedIn profile interesting, doing some online courses to brush up your skills or even certification & contacting the right consultancies for an interview.
Following these milestones make you reach the goal you have in mind is a better way than having only one thing in mind to change the job. Break your goals into milestones and completing each milestone will help you to reach your goal quicker and better.
Goals:
Goals are impulsive. We set our goals as we move on with our lives. We think of life with goals that give us comfort and happiness. Goals are straight forward and ever-changing. It changes for you as you keep on reaching it. If your goal is to become the greatest footballer of all time, what would you do after becoming one? At that point, your goal again changes to reach a certain level or to help people or making society better. If your goal is to read 1000 books, after reading those books, your mind carves to read more and you again set another goal to read 1000 more. Goals work like this and it keeps changing one after the other.
Mission:
The mission is the long-term goal that requires us to work for it by achieving goals. Achieving milestones, take us to reach a goal but achieving several goals may lead us to completion of mission or it’s different. The setting a mission for our life means defining the purpose of it. It is one of the higher purposes of our life. It is an achievers’ goal where they want to make a difference through their presence. If you think about building a business that makes trillion dollars and employs thousands of people, that is your mission which is set to come true one day based on the work you put it to make it a reality.
Isolated from vision, we can call mission as also called a short-term vision that needs to be achieved in a single lifetime that implies solace. If our presence is making this world a better place, think that the purpose of your life is served and connection to bad obligations is severed.
Vision:
As I already mentioned about the vision, it is the greatest purpose of life which sometimes takes more than a lifetime to achieve. If we consider an organization like Google, its vision is to provide the information of the world in a click. They are achieving it but not at the full scale. Achieving the vision takes more than reaching milestones, goals, and mission. We ought to impose different kinds of variables into it. Visions can be achievable and also at the same time, we cannot figure the things out about reaching them.
Why have a vision if it is not achievable?
If we have a vision for our life or the companies that has the vision tends to move in a path where that connects the dots to meet at a certain point close to vision. The paths we choose to change over time but if the vision is constant, it doesn’t matter which path you are choosing, ultimately you will find a way back to focus on your vision even in your lost days. I can say vision as a compass no matter how old the tech might be, it always shows you the right direction. In following the direction shown by compass, we then try to discover new routes that can take us to our vision one day or the process of finding the greatest purpose helps us to find the real purpose of life.
Every soul’s purpose is to get salvation likewise, in a journey of births and deaths, we find an adventure to capitalise on and enjoy the thing called life.
OMG! Insider:
The interesting fact about mission and vision is that mission is for a lifetime and vision is something that has got a higher purpose. When we take a look at life from a broader perspective, Goals become milestones of mission and missions will be the milestones of the vision. Ultimately, as long as we keep expanding our thinking and broaden our views, larger things will become smaller ones.
A vision gives you a general direction for life while a process goal is part of the dream that you are accomplishing by taking specific actions today. — Thomas Abreu
Unless we open our mind, the journey in life will become miserable and makes us run behind money, wealth and success. Success is a variable for every life. For your success might be earning money, having a car and buy a million-dollar villa. For others, having a roof above their heads and 3 times of food every day is a success.
When we open our minds, we invite infinite possibilities to think and adapt. Meeting new people, reading books, listening to podcasts & sharing views with people who oppose your thoughts and make it perfect to make them understand are the facts that will make you interested and opens your mind to welcoming things that you never imagined they exist.
Conclusion:
Milestones, Goals, Mission & Vision are the basic setup that this universe has given to every living being. From mother protecting her kid to a tree giving shade to infinite birds, we all are connected in the world. Carrying out each of the effects that brings humanity a subtle art of living.
Think again before setting any goals in life, divide them in milestones and later convert goals into achieving your mission that is connected to all goals you have acomplished. Vision comes later which directs your mission to reach it’s destination forever.
Happy Reading and Goal Setting.
This article is also published in harithsanotes.substack.com.
