Importance of having goals in your life

This would be a standard question in interviews – “Where do you see yourself five years from now? How do you answer that if you have not thought about your goals?

Goals are important in life. If you do not know where you have to go, any road will take you there. However, we have limited time on this earth and unless we plan what we want to be remembered as when we are gone, we will end up wasting our life without reaching anywhere. What we want to become has to be contained in our personal mission statement which we must think deeply and write down. That gives us a direction. Based on this we must write long term goals of 5 years from now and then break it down to six monthly goals and then weekly goals. We must dedicate time each week to do those tasks which have a bearing on our long term goal and hence the mission statement.

There is a beautiful “doha” or duet by Sant Kabir which reads as under:

Kabira Jab Paida Hue To Jag Hansa Hum Roye

Aisi Karni Kar Chalo, Hum Hanse Jag Roye

You can listen to the full song at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-vUzgmN7p0

This is for the whole life. But we cannot achieve the life’s mission unless we work every day towards it so that when we go out of this world, we go laughing with the full satisfaction that we have achieved everything that we wanted, while the world grieves that it has lost a good human being.

Achieving the life’s Mission is by having meaningful goals.  Goals need to be SMART:  It means that they have to be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound.

Based on the life’s mission, we must have some clarity of our goals for the next 5 years and should be able to convince the interviewer that we are working on a weekly basis towards that goal. But ensure that the goals you have is in line with the job that you are trying to get. If they are at cross purposes, the interviewer will see that you are just interested in the job only for a short duration and that the job does not fit your goal.

Have some goals based on what you think you want to do in life and do such actions that lead to that goal. You should have such answers ready as there will be questions asking you such as “Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?”