Limitations of Goals

We are constantly told the importance of goals. I feel goals represent a huge risk to you achieving what you want to do.

To illustrate, lets look at an example. I'm not musical at all, can't play a note, but I envy people who create widely enjoyed music. Take The Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards started playing blues music together for hours on end, day in day out, in a small bedsit. They were essentially music nerds devouring music from the US and perfecting the skill to mimic the style. Quite simple, they loved it and their feel for the anatomy of good music couple with growing guitar skills then grew into their own creative process. Now, I have not met either of them but I will bet that neither of them set goals to make Xmillion $, sell out stadiums, have platinum albums. Had they done so, they would probably have failed and we would never of heard of them. Had that been their goal, it is likely they would have surveyed the music scene at that time and tried to produce music to gain a share of the existing market. Instead, the created their own unique style from their passion, and it so happened that there were plenty of people who loved it.

Similarly, some comedy writers say they write what they find funny and just hope others will too. If no one else does at least they have pleased one person!

Very short-term goals may be useful to help structure our activity but there a plenty of successful people who have followed their dreams and say they never had any kind of plan. 
A 50 year old man today is starting to work on his passion and he hopes to be doing it for about 30 years providing. How can he possibly anticipate the twists and turns that this new and exciting path will take him? And if he sets goals then how does he know these will be the ones that ultimately fulfill him the most. He might quite rightly set objectives that reflect his passion eg "I want to write poetry that I enjoy and at least a few others genuinely enjoy". Such an objective lets his passion find the best path. It might not be selling 1m books but it might be reading at local hospices and enriching peoples lives. Goals have a habit of becoming too rigid, and if we change them or fail to attain them we become disillusioned or feel we are a quitter. One can observe people setting goals and attaining them from being focused and dedicated. Take a businessman who says he wants profit of $1m in 5 years. He gets there one year early. Hooray. So what, is he now wonderfully happy? Chances are he is pleased for a few weeks but then he says to himself now what? What was the point of all the work? What am I really passionate about? He has essentially deferred asking himself the important questions for four years.  How many of us have met an entrepreneur who smugly states "At the age of ..... I wrote down everything I wanted including a Rolls Royce, a yacht, and I got every single one of them". These goals are essentially a shopping list incapable of giving guidance into a happy and fulfilling life. It is easy to get fixated on these types of goals and feel a strange kind of contentment striving towards them. I suggest this is a weak, transient type of contentment that diverts us away from tackling our real wants. Often people who live by these sorts of goals end up miserable when they attain them.