Reflections about acting towards our goals

About our goals

We all have goals in our life, and we usually put most of our time in accomplishing them. If you have already chosen your goals and you are totally clear in what you want, you have not finished. Although thinking and choosing what you want means a lot and can help you keep focus, you have not done anything yet, your journey is just beginning.

The plans themselves will not change anything in the real world. For that, events and actions are needed in a material way. These can be consequences of natural phenomena or random acts but also the actions of people can have an impact on desirable results. Someone can do something so that what you want happens, let’s not forget we create our present with our actions and our future with our thoughts.

It is often clear who could take care of that. Someone in your environment who has the possibilities of making your life more pleasant and normally you already know who this person is. For example "if he (or she) does that, then...". "If my boss did this..." or "if my partner did this ...". However unfortunately these people are not always willing to do what you want, or perhaps they are not aware of your goals and wishes.

It is always better if we take actions by ourselves

Therefore, sometimes, or probably most of the time, you are the only person who can fulfill your wishes. If you want to learn or remember something or want to win in a competition, that is something that others cannot do for you. Only you can show your own abilities. However, in most things others can do something to help you achieve what you want. There might be things that one cannot do without the help of others. Although in that case you always have the possibility to take action and get closer to your goal.

Normally you can do something so that other people do what you want or need. That thing can be your job. If you are a boss, you have to make sure that other employees do what you would have done.

If you have a chance to let others do what you want, you can choose whether you are going to act or not. In this case I always advise doing something yourself. I know that this advice might not sound very logical. Why strive if there is someone willing to do things for you? You can say that this is a waste of energy. Especially if the other person can do better than you.

Of course there are limits. There is no point in trying to do something for hours that you could ask others to do without any effort. However, even in this case I advise you to do at least a small part level like making preparations and assisting the other person so you can learn something, and perhaps next time you would not need any help. Because I think it almost always has advantages to do something yourself, learning new things now only increase our wisdom but also our independency as individuals. The advantage is not materialistic but psychological which makes it even more important.

About the natural development of individual independence

It is young children who already know the importance of doing things themselves. Babies on the other hand, should know how to make others care for them. But months later as toddlers they ask to do things for themselves and they start to wish for a greater independency in their own actions. They are often heard screaming that they want to do things alone when you try to help them or do something for them.

Of course they need to do things by themselves to learn something but I think the tendency to do what they see others doing is not just for skill training. For that the momentum is too great. It seems that it is something more essential in his life. They need to do things alone for the development of their independent and autonomous personality.

I think that children's desire to do things themselves is an example of the wisdom we have sometimes lost as adults. As a consequence of the modern world with an abundance of many things, especially if we are wealthy, we do not have to do anything except work and other duties. That is comfortable but not beneficial for our physical or mental health, there are a lot of skills we could learn that are useful in life, like mechanical or electrical skills, that we simply don’t learn because we have other person (the technician) taking care of it.

More than leaving others act for you, if you are acting yourself, you are the one who determines what happens. You can experience the effect of your actions directly. That gives you a sense of control and independence. Then you know from your own experience that you are not at the mercy of others. You do not need to wait for what they do or what they are willing to do. You are in charge and that gives you a conviction of the importance of you as a person and the value of your skills.

That contributes to your self-esteem especially if what you have done is a success. But even if what you have done is a failure you will feel better than if you had been waiting without doing anything. Without acting you are treating yourself as if you were an object without will, that is , as if you were not a living being. On the other hand, by acting, you can enjoy the experience and be able to say with conviction: I am alive!!!

Conclusion

Asking for help when we really need it is totally fine, as long as we don’t abuse by asking too much, and as long as we really can’t do the task by ourselves. Nevertheless, even when we are granted the help, we should prove our appreciation by assisting the other person who is teaching us, in any way we can, and by trying to learn about the task so in the future we are able to do it ourselves so we don’t depend on others and perhaps even helping other people.

What we should always strive for is for our own personal growth. And we have opportunities to do this every day, there is always new knowledge to earn and new skills to master, we just need to put our time into them and eventually good results will follow.

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