I've been thinking about my goals and why I have them. It started when I asked myself why I'm writing to become a better thinker. Initially, it felt like a weird question to ask because it inherently seems like a good thing, but to every thought I had, I kept asking "why does this matter?", "why is it so important to me?" and "what's the point?". That led me down a rabbit hole of questioning all my other goals, and my motivations.

I thought about what my goals may be costing me, by taking time and energy away from other arguably more important things. As I questioned why certain things are important to me, I found myself leaning on and repeating perspectives that I'd encountered from others, in books and podcasts. It scared me a little, to wonder if those views were really my own. I felt like I could keep on digging and poking at all my thoughts, but still never quite land on the answer.

Maybe I was taking an overly rational view of life - searching for answers (as I'd been trained to in school) which don't exist. I turned my attention to how things made me feel. Do my goals get me excited? Does what I do bring me joy, happiness and pleasure? It seemed like a good way to gauge what matters to me, but I also knew that these emotions are transient. It's easy when they're around, but when they leave, what keeps us going?

Coincidentally, I stumbled upon these 3 amazing paragraphs

Stumbled upon this from @BrentBeshore, an extract from The Science of Storytelling

Constructing meaning, living a story. That seems to be the only reasonable answer to why we do anything and everything. We all get to choose why we do things, and what the point of it all is. I was searching for the right answer to explain why writing to become a better thinker matters to me, but there's no right answer. There's only the story I choose to tell myself.

So in the end, I find myself right back where I started, looking at my goals and asking myself the same questions: "why does this matter?", "why is it so important to me?" and "what's the point?".

Again, I start by thinking about the outcomes I'm trying to move towards and why that matters to me. And again, I reflect on what I feel and what I want to feel. It's a good start, but I need my stories to be more compelling. I need a villain. So this time, I'm also thinking about what I'm trying to move (or run) away from - the outcomes and experience I don't want, and the emotions I don't want to feel.

Something important I want to remind myself is that my stories can and will change. Jim Coudal said that "the reason that most of us are unhappy most of the time is that we set our goals not for the person we’re going to be when we reach them, but we set our goals for the person we are when we set them."

I don't want that. I know I'll change over time, which means I'll need to regularly jump back into this rabbit hole to examine and challenge my stories; to avoid chasing goals that no longer matter, or re-assess why they do.