Imagine you’re about to go on vacation. Do you drop everything and hit the road on a whim? No. You pick a place you want to go.

Once you figure out where you want to go, you can start figuring out how to get there. You can also track your progress along your journey. You’ll know if you’re making good time or if you need to speed up a bit.

Life is similar. Knowing where you want to go in life is incredibly powerful. Setting goals for yourself is like picking destinations for your life. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people don’t really have goals – they either never created goals for themselves, or they achieved their previous goals and haven’t yet set new ones.​

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you have to spend every second of every day working toward a goal. But setting goals for yourself helps keep you on the path toward creating a fulfilling life for yourself.

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More Focus

The main reason why goals help keep you on the path is because they make it clearer what you need to focus on next. The key here is to focus on the next step in front of you instead of all of the steps between yourself and your destination.

For example, I lost 170bs over the course of several years. When I was starting out, I quickly realized that focusing on losing all of that weight wasn’t the right move because it wasn’t clear. So, I broke the goal of losing 170lbs down into subgoals of losing 10lbs, then I focused on the next 10lb goal in front of me.

Taking the next 10lb step was much more clear and manageable than taking the entire 170lb leap. I was able to methodically make my way from A to B by focusing on the next step in front of me.

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Positive and Negative Feedback

Clear goals (and subgoals) help make the path clearer. Another benefit of this is making it more obvious when you go astray. If you don’t really know where you’re going, how could you possibly know when you make a wrong turn and get lost? Because if you don’t know where you want to go, you could be speeding toward a place you don’t want to go.

This can happen without you even realizing it. I’ve been there – after I finished college, I became depressed and started eating and drinking too much. Because I hadn’t set a new goal for myself, I wasn’t really aware of how my actions where taking me to a place I didn’t want to go. Slowly, over time, I regained weight and hurt my health. I went from 190lbs back up to over 300lbs.

It wasn’t until I set new goals for myself that I could truly see how far I had gotten from the path I actually wanted to be on. After then, I was able to pick up on feedback that told me I was doing things right or wrong.

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Increased Efficiency

As I said earlier, you don’t have to be working toward a goal at all times. In fact, maybe you don’t want to be working toward a goal at all right now. Maybe you prefer to take each day as it comes, make the best of it, and end up where you end up. If that approach to life is fulfilling to you, then I support you.

But if you aren’t fulfilled – if you feel a hunger inside you yearning for greater achievement, knowledge, and impact – creating goals for yourself will help you reach fulfillment more efficiently. Time is the one truly limited resource in the universe. I want you to use your time as you see fit – but that requires you to know what fitting uses of your time are.

Many of us waste a lot of time every day. That includes me. I sometimes have a habit of scrolling on social media for a few minutes in between tasks. This time quickly adds up to a couple wasted hours every day – time I could’ve spent reading, working, or actually relaxing. Focusing more on what I actually want for my life has helped me reclaim my time so I can achieve the fulfillment I crave.

Take 15 minutes to set some goals today. You’ll be glad you did.