|
 |
|
|
Goals as Things
A goal, in the motivational sense (rather than the sports sense), is generally defined as such:
There are lots of planning terms that seem to outline the concept of "a goal":
All of these words, to me, connote a strong sense of "thinghood" to the idea of a goal. It's as if this goal is out in the world, and you can draw a sharp edge around it, and you can pick it up and point to it and move it around. In reality, "people setting out to do things" is just not so clean as that. Let's take a look: A person decides to build a bookshelf. You could say that this is a goal. The person then inventories his materials and realizes he needs wood and tools. Now he needs to acquire all these things, which could be said to be a task. He looks up where in the local area he can get everything, and decides to stop at a hardware store and a lumber yard, in that order, which could be said to be a plan. Along the way to the hardware store is a sign that reads "Bookshelves 25% off". The person pulls in, sees a bookshelf, buys it, and takes it home. No tools or wood were purchased. The original goal-- to build a bookshelf-- morphed into "to have a bookshelf". Goals, tasks, and milestones morph all the time. So, the interesting question is: how do they morph? What is the nature of goals? What is a better way of looking at goals, in contradistinction to goals as solid objects? Any goal is an individual's attempt to define a future state that is different in some way to the present state. Let's use some symbols, shall we? S(p) = State of the Present. S(f) = State of the future, after the goal is no longer a goal. Add one more to the mix: S(g) = Person-conceived future state as best guess of what an achieved goal will create, imagined from the context of S(p). So, we have a distinction between S(p), S(f), and S(g). S(f) may well be different than S(g). So, I get a notion to change something about the current state of affairs around me. A gap opens up in my perception. I now hold in my mind a conception of a goal-achiement state, S(g), and the present state S(p). This delta between the two becomes a perceived journey that I can take or influence. This perceived delta deserves its own symbol: D(p-g). Note that the delta does not actually have anything to do with the actualy future state, when the goal is no longer perceived to have a delta with reality. Along the way, the present state changes as I introduce activity into the world. I try to achieve the goal, and my own context changes, changing S(p) itself: I learn new things about the present state that I didn't know before, I discover new aspects to the perceived delta D(p-g), the delta D(p-g) appears to change (usually becomes wider), the imagined goal state S(g) may change. The entire context of a goal is a dynamically fluctuating system of interdependent forces. So, the actual goal does not matter. What matters is that the perceived delta between the state of the present S(p) and some imagined goal S(g) becomes lessened, approaching zero but perhaps never reaching it.
|
