I love urging people on to new adventures, to the setting of new goals and the pursuing of new possibilities. But I never want to encourage anyone to launch into a disaster. So many of the success books of the past century have focused on the importance of setting and maintaining goals that stretch us, and many have stressed both dreaming big and aiming high, but few have said very much about the even more vital importance of having appropriate goals - proper goals, goals that are really deeply right for us. In the wake of all the dot-com failures of the recent past, and in view of the extraordinarily exciting time we face as we move forward, a time that is so full of promise and danger, this is a topic we need to address. I want to share just a few thoughts with you today about avoiding the wrong goals.
Life often involves a juxtaposition of opposites.
For both adventurous and appropriate goal setting, we need to be both bold and cautious - bold enough to launch out into unknown terrain when we feel we hear the call to go forth, yet cautious enough to resist the siren song of goals that might look good from a distance, but ultimately would not be right for us to pursue. Avoiding the wrong goals can be every bit as important as embracing the right ones. And we all have one power that can make this sometimes difficult to do. One of the strongest forces in human life is the power of self-deception. The wisest among us can at times somehow manage to fool ourselves into thinking that something we know deep down to be wrong is actually perfectly permissible, and even advantageous for us to pursue in the circumstances.