What Being Lost On A Mountain Taught Me About Goals
By: Braden Moore
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Life, Productivity

When I was in school, I joined the orienteering team. For the uninitiated, orienteering is the sport of running around some unknown land with a map and a compass, then trying to find all the checkpoints faster than anyone else. And so it only made sense, on one quiet, grey autumn day, for me to get on a bus and head out to the mountains.

There was only one problem — I didn’t know how to read a map.

I also didn’t know how to use a compass.

And I didn’t think either of those mattered.

So maybe there were three problems.

And so it happened that I ended up lost on Mt. Macedon. Lost, without a phone, so wildly far off course that I actually found houses. Houses. I don’t think anyone lived on the mountain, so I must’ve left the “mountain” and entered the “village”.

Eventually, I made it back to the bus. I was late enough, however, that we didn’t get to stop for ice cream on the way home.

Without having a clear path to follow and directions to guide me, my attempts at orienteering proved quite unsuccessful. In orienteering as well as life, you need three things to get to where you want to go: a compass, a map, and a path to tread. This is what I call the hierarchy of goals:

Your life goals are your compass,

are your compass, Your achievement goals are the checkpoints on your map,

are the checkpoints on your map, Your process goals are the paths you tread.

By developing your own hierarchy of goals, you’ll be able to navigate your way through any mountain.

Your compass: life goals

“If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.” — Seneca

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you’re there?

Without a compass to guide you, it’s easy to get lost on a mountain or in life. With one, you know where you’re headed. This is the importance of having life goals. Ask yourself: What do you want to do with your life? Where do you see yourself in 5–10 years? These are your life goals. This is your personal mission statement. Let them be your guide.

Once you have set your life goals, as former Olympic fencer Steven Paul writes, “you have to live your life as though every day is one step closer to reaching your goals”. Once you know where you want to go, your everyday actions should be consistent with getting there. However, your inner compass, as psychologist Angela Duckworth describes life goals, might not come unbidden to you. In fact, these goals — your passion — needs to be “developed” over many years as you discover what is truly important in your life.

You might, like me, take up guitar, French, piano, music production, tai chi, Japanese, bouldering… then come to realise that, perhaps, you’re not truly passionate about any of these things. Finding your inner compass takes time, but once you have found it, stick to it. Your life goals should not change year after year. If they do, you need to deeply assess what is most important to you in your life. Work on developing your passion.

You should have one or two top-level life goals. Here’s one of mine, one of my personal mission statements:

To become an Olympian in the sport of fencing

Where does your compass point?

Find out where your compass points, then follow it. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Your checkpoints: achievement goals

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that we aim too high and we miss our goal, but that we aim too low and reach it.” — Michelangelo

Knowing how to use a compass is a great start — it helps if you know where true north lies. However, a compass point alone is not enough. Your life goals are too far away for you to reach without some guidance. Consider how I navigated my mountainous orienteering course — I aligned my compass with where I wanted to end up, then headed straight in that direction. This, as I became painfully aware, involved running up and down steep valleys, over barbed wire, and through unfriendly foliage. In the end, I didn’t even end up where I’d planned.

The same is true for your life goals — without something to aim for along the way, how can you stay on track? In life, achievement goals are your checkpoints along the map.

Your achievement goals are the measurable results you hope to achieve each year. Their success should move you towards achieving your life goals. You should revisit them each year, make new ones, and assess the previous year’s efforts.

These goals should each stretch you that bit further towards achieving your life goals. As Steven Paul writes, they should be “realistic plus 20%”. Too difficult, and your self-confidence will take a hit, from the pressure and from actual failure. Too easy, and you won’t grow.

Each life goal should have 3–4 achievement goals underpinning it. To push me towards my life goal of becoming an Olympic fencer, here are some of my goals for the year:

Finish first in my club rankings

Place top 4 in at least two competitions

Score 1000 points in my bouts

Your achievement goals flow directly from your life goals. Once you know your direction in life, work out the checkpoints you need to hit along the way.

The paths you tread: process goals

“Big things of the world can only be achieved by attending to their small beginnings.” -Lao Tzu

Let’s imagine, in some fantasy world where I was not awful at orienteering, that I had my compass, I used my map and I aimed for my checkpoints. How would I get from my starting point to the checkpoint, then from each checkpoint to the next? By putting one foot in front of the other. By taking small steps, over and over again, each taking me one step closer to the next goal.

In life, these small steps are your process goals. These are the measurable activities which help you to reach your achievement goals. These are active, actionable activities. What can you do, right now, today, or this week, which will propel you towards achieving your larger goals? These can be habitual behaviours or once-off tasks. I wrote earlier that your everyday actions needed to be consistent with your life goals. Well, your process goals are a large part of those everyday actions.

Besides their size and timescale, there are two key differences between process goals and other goals.

First: these goals can — and should — change over time. Remember that your process goals exist to help you fulfil your achievement goals, which in turn build towards your life goals. Your life goals should be fixed, your achievement goals should rarely need to change. However, if your process goals aren’t working for you, readjust. As long as you are consistent with your life goals, do whatever you need to achieve them.

Second: you can directly influence the achievement of your process goals. There’s no singular thing I can do to “become an Olympic fencer”. Similarly, I can’t write “finish first in my club rankings” on my to-do list and reasonably hope to complete it by bedtime. However, you can (for instance) plan to “attend fencing sessions 3 times a week” — and be in complete control of whether you achieve that goal.

For every achievement goal, you should have at least 3–5 process goals which facilitate achieving them. As an example, to achieve my goal of finishing first in my club rankings, I intend to:

Attend fencing sessions at least 3 times a week

Fence against 80% of the possible opponents each month

Record the outcome of all my bouts

Every day, week and month, you can improve yourself and make progress towards your goals.