Goals vs Actions

Is there any benefit to setting goals or should I just stop talking and do it?

This is a question I have been pondering a lot recently.  If you have read my blog for a while you will probably be aware that I use it as a format to log and keep track of my goals.

But as I look through my old posts and see goals that I didn’t achieve (or maybe never even started) I began questioning whether I should just save the time of even putting any thought into the process and focus energy onto action.

But then I saw this quote from Winston Churchill and it kind of made me realise that I was doing the right thing:

Those who plan do better than those who do not plan even though they rarely stick to their plan – Winston Churchill #quoteoftheday#projects

— James (@PerfectSelf) June 22, 2016

Although I don’t always stick to my plans (and be aware that in the context of this post I am using goals and plans to mean the same thing), by writing down something to aim towards, I have a direction – even if these plans change into something else later down the line.

Sometimes I have done nothing to achieve a goal and then I felt quite bad, but I realised that it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing but made me realise what things I really wanted in life and what I didn’t want.

Usually the things I do want have had some action against them!

To really understand whether goal setting has been good to me or if I am just procrastinating, I only have to reflect on the period when I didn’t have any goals and achieved very little to realise that the exercise so far has been quite beneficial.

In conclusion I feel the practice of putting a goal down on paper is best, because I feel it increases the probability it will be achieved, rather than being something else in the back of my mind that I will do “Someday..”