The journey to success begins with the intricate art of purposeful daydreaming

Consider the most successful people you know: either personal contacts, or world famous figures; Consider the most successful organizations, and even nations that come to mind, who have achieved success far beyond their peers. If we go back sufficiently in the histories or life cycles of these individuals, organizations or countries, we may reach a point where their situations were absolutely comparable to those of their peers. At that point in time, they had no specific advantages, and there were no natural reasons why they should have succeeded far more in the future, compared to their peers or competitors. Then why did they succeed and grow?

We suggest that one key reason for success, invariably, is that these successful people chose, defined clearly, and pursued consistently, the correct goals. This does not mean that these ultimately successful individuals or groups always knew where they were going, that they never made mistakes or never strayed in wrong directions. What we mean is that at critical points in time, they eventually chose the correct goals and began to travel the required path to these goals effectively, also returning to this path if they occasionally deviated.

If you don’t care where you want to get to, it does not matter which way you go

- Paraphrased from ”Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Caroll

If you are on the wrong road, it does not matter how hard you run or how fast you drive.

- Anonymous

Even though the importance of determining and pursuing our true goals has been widely written, taught and talked about, many individuals (and organizations) often find out, and rather too late and painfully, that they were pursuing the wrong goals, squandering their precious time and effort… perhaps for years!

At ASPIREKEN, we believe that the path to success begins with figuring out what your true goals should be. In future blog articles, we shall discuss how to strategically analyze our preparedness to reach these goals, how to find the correct roadmaps, how to build capability and capacity to move towards them in a systematic fashion, how to counter inevitable challenges along the way like failures, unexpected obstacles, distractions, the temptation to give up, and so on. We shall also present stories and cases of ASPIREKEN methods applied to different domains for achieving challenging goals. But in this article, we focus on practical methods to actually figure out WHAT YOUR REAL GOALS SHOULD BE.

First, a valuable quote to guide us (paraphrased and variously attributed to Roy Amara, Bill Gates and others in various forms):

“We often tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term,

but grossly underestimate what we can do in the long term”

The good news is that determining your true long term goals is possibly the most fun part of goal achievement. At this stage, we do not (yet) have to call upon our commitment, discipline, hard work, sacrifices, intensity and endurance. In fact, we now have to indulge in that pleasurable mental activity that all human beings do at some time: daydreaming. Yes, even the building of a corporate or national vision for a large organization or country must actually begin this way. However, the daydreaming we refer to here is not a random, aimless activity, but rather a controlled and purposeful one, which should not be allowed to go rogue, and should follow a systematic process as described further below. While visioning or visualization may be more technically appropriate terms, I specifically say daydreaming to emphasize the following:

• It is a deeply personal process concerned with self exploration and discovery. Even visioning for an organization invariably begins with the dreams of leaders tasked with deciding the future directions of the organization. In the case of a team of equals, the starting point is actually the controlled daydreaming of each individual, followed by sharing, brain storming and collaboration.

• It is a largely internal process, i.e. even if we receive and process information from outside, the choice of our goals comes from inside.

• It is a non-rational process associated with emotion, intuition, value choices and personality traits. (“Non-rational” must NOT be confused with “irrational”, which is the opposite of logical, intelligent, reasonable and rational).

• At the early stage, it should be done in a free, uninhibited and unconstrained manner – therefore, what safer place to do it, than in one’s own mind? Of course you can use pen, paper, computers and phones, to record your purposeful daydreams.

So now, let’s get into the actual systematic process of purposeful and controlled daydreaming, which is focused on the sole objective of identifying our own true long term goals:

• Begin daydreaming by actually thinking of what you want most. In case this activity happens over multiple days and occasions, keep a mental or physical (paper, PC, phone) note of where you left off last time. Record both, the choices of goals that naturally attract you, as well as those that repel you. You can keep it all private, or share it with mentors or friends who you trust.

• Ask yourself – are these really your goals, chosen and desired by you, or have they been given to you by others (it could be parents, family elders, organization seniors, role models, peers, even society)

• Do the goals you begin to get attracted to, appeal to your value system, i.e. what you believe to be good, and what you believe to be bad? Would you be proud and comfortable to talk about them openly? If they are so lofty that you are shy to talk about the scale of the goal openly, that is not a problem, and you could continue on those paths. But if the goals conflict with your morals and ethics and therefore you do not want to talk about them openly, it IS a problem, and perhaps you should reject that path.

• Are the choices of your long term goals being limited by short term constraints? One of the frequent problems we have seen with both individual and organizational visioning is the confusion between shorter term constraints and requirements, with long term aspirations.

• Does the very act of daydreaming about these goals, fill you with excitement, energy and purpose? Do you like spending your time and energy thinking about them? Or, do they tire you out; make you feel weak, hopeless and inadequate?

• Try to see as much in the future as you can. Sometimes, we can see distant goals more clearly than the path to them, like on a foggy mountain trek, we can see the distant peak we want to reach, but not the path in between. Purposeful daydreaming can be most beneficial if we focus on distant goals and ensure that we do not underestimate our long term potential, as quoted earlier.

• Next, describe the long term goals that you see, in as much detail as possible. This is where daydreaming really takes off (the fun part: ha ha!), and no detail is too trivial, as it all aids visualization. If you dream of growing your little startup to a corporate giant and you are already dreaming of what your CEO office shall look like, do not stop yourself. If you are a student of science dreaming of winning the Nobel Prize and giving the acceptance speech, then that’s absolutely fine! In fact, a critical step of the ASPIREKEN process is to define the desired state in as much detail as possible.

• If on the other hand, the long term vision is not clear to you and you can only think in a transactional manner about immediate tasks, then we need to address that. In such a case, you must (A) keep visualizing the end of the short term, and try to see what (long term vision) it can lead to, and (B) keep asking yourself whether even the short term appeals to your tastes, your value system and your personal traits.

• Most important of all: ask yourself if the long term goals that your daydreams yield, actually match up to your true potential as a person who can still learn and do much, much more. Therefore, you should match your future goal, with the future "YOU", and not the present "you".

• Once you have arrived at some long term goals with the above methods, again validate whether they are big enough to not become an underestimation of your potential, whether they fundamentally appeal to your value system, and whether they are clear, distinct and described in some detail in your mind. If you choose multiple goals, examine if they can coexist, or if they conflict with each other.

If you have reached this point, then the process of purposeful daydreaming is over for now, and we can move to the subsequent processes of goal achievement, which we shall get into in future weekly blogs. Also it should be noted that purposeful daydreaming need not be a one-time process. It could be repeated from time to time, to revisit our dreams, revalidate our goals and explore new thoughts. Besides enabling our growth, it can also be a rejuvenating and energizing process.

In the course of my own growth, I have learnt and benefited from too many people to be mentioned in one small space. But for some of the learning shared in this specific article, I would like to acknowledge the inputs I have received in the past from Shalini Singh, Kalyani Krishnan, Ian Faria and the videos of Marcus Buckingham.