Goals are like fuels for humans. Humans perform any activity because it offers them results that are rewards/dopamine for our brain. So goals can be anything starting from fulfilling my hunger to become an ultra-rich man.
In this blog, we are going to talk about:
The human brain needs.
Why do goals become important?
How to set goals?
The Human Brain Needs
We may have evolved a lot but our brain still follows certain principles that our stone age ancestors had. Those principles were:
Get food and water.
Get shelter and security.
Have relationships with others (Have a tribe or community).
Psychological, physiological, and spiritual growth.
As time passed, people thought their needs had changed but in reality, all new needs are produced from these 4 basic principles.
Example:
Money —> Food, water, shelter & security.
Love and Friends —> Have relationships with others.
So this means most of the actions we perform are somewhat related to these 4 principles which means human nature is to have goals (short-term or long-term) to accomplish the most basic needs.
Why Do Goals Become Important?
The human brain has one more tendency, it doesn’t want to put much effort into accomplishing goals as that will require more energy and ultimately more food and water (which our Stone Age ancestors had little).
This is the reason why most of us choose the path where there is less effort and all our human needs are just fulfilled. This leads us to just enjoy the time without caring about anything.
What’s wrong with it?
It seems a good situation to many and so to my past self, but over time I realized that that good time was nothing but a scarcity mindset and cheap dopamine shots. This is the philosophy I believe in that when you experience things at the greatest heights the dopamine peaks will be greater than the summation of all those cheap dopamine.
The best part is you don’t have to wait till you achieve your goals, just by taking action towards your goals your brain believes that you will get to your goal and this produces dopamines equivalent to those cheap shots. Now answer me why not do it this way?
There will be times when things won’t be easy in the second case but remember more difficult it is to achieve more the higher the level of dopamine will increase.
How To Set Goals?
You need to understand this, the process of setting goals and achieving them will be there throughout your life. Therefore it is important to build a system that helps us discover our new goals and adapt to them as soon as possible or else you already know by now ‘OUR BRAIN WANTS NO EFFORTS’.
Now this section is something I will write again in the future because I am still not sure what is the best way. But I can suggest a few ways that may work (I thought about reasons why I got my current goal in the first place and came to some conclusions):
Inspirations: There is a huge possibility that you are unaware of what you deeply desire, it is there but still you can’t see it and you just need to see someone else do that thing, that’s when your desire turns into a burning desire and you focus on one thing which is achieving that goal.
Knowledge: There is also a possibility that you know what you want but still think you can’t achieve it because it’s accessible to only a few. In that case, you don’t lack inspiration, you lack knowledge. Your brain fails to build a plan to execute to achieve those goals.
In my case, I lacked both, but then inspiration came, and then came the knowledge. When you discover your goals all previous small dots connect and you realize this was something you always wanted.
So that makes it obvious what should be our steps to set goals:
Meet more people/ Watch more types of content.
Read books out of your favorite genre and explore other domains.
If possible change your current environment.
Leave yourself with your thoughts and observe them.
This is a topic I am still learning through my experiences and would love to share whatever discoveries I make. If you have something to add to this feel free to DM me on my Twitter.
That’s all for DAY7.