The Philosophy of Goal-Setting and Fulfillment

What is fulfillment? What fulfills us and why?

Why does this matter? I believe that answering these questions can inform what we do and how we think about what we do. Defining and understanding purpose and fulfillment should, ideally, give us a better understanding of how to have purpose and feel fulfilled. How can we chase something that we don’t even understand?

My first task is to try and understand what constitutes fulfillment. Is it a feeling? An objective state? An emotion?

(For the sake of this argument, I won’t currently address long term/lifelong fulfillment and focus more on the granular, day to day element of fulfillment)

Well, I won’t call it an emotion simply because that label is too amorphous as it stands. I would posit that it is fully subjective, so it probably stacks up closer to a feeling than anything else. The argument that fulfillment is objective is a difficult one, as I don’t see how anyone has the right to decide whether or not someone else is fulfilled. There are no concrete characteristics of fulfillment or what would fulfill someone. A serial killer can feel just as fulfilled and satisfied after a day of killing innocent bystanders as much as a Good Samaritan that was able to feed 100 starving kids — and both of those feelings of fulfillment could be of the same magnitude. They could both look back and think “what a good day of work. I accomplished so much” and could both be “correct”, per say. Correct meaning that they were accurately describing their feelings about what they had accomplished in their day. That being said, I would posit that fulfillment is a subjective feeling.

Characterizing it further, fulfillment seems to be inherently linked to accomplishment. You feel fulfilled after a day of doing things you’re proud of, after a day of accomplishing things. And accomplishment does not need to be restricted to that which we stereotypically think of — like producing x amount of PowerPoint slides, making x amount of dollars, getting a raise, etc. Accomplishment can simply be cooking a good dinner, reconnecting with an old friend, and making time to read a book. However, the threshold and content of these accomplishments that constitute fulfillment are wholly subjective as well. Some people may need to just accomplish 1 minor thing to be fulfilled, while others may need to achieve a lot during their day to feel a genuine sense of fulfillment. This threshold is generally determined by the individual’s baseline. If you are a college student that skips class all the time and just gets high 24/7, making yourself a healthy breakfast might be enough of an accomplishment for you to characterize this as a day well done. On the other hand, if you’re a type A executive that is consistently magnificent at work, always eats healthy, has good relationships with their family, works out daily — it would potentially take more to constitute a fulfilled day. In these scenarios, the achievements themselves have different magnitudes as well — the achievement of making a good breakfast for that college student has significantly more weight than for the executive that does that every day anyway.

I think there’s one more level of fulfillment — goal setting. Working towards a long term goal generally provides a sense of strong fulfillment on a daily basis, and the achievements working towards that goal really work towards fulfilling that “quota”. I have a goal to lose weight, and the days that I am able to eat healthy and work out, I have a high sense of fulfillment. I start a new job, the days that I learn or achieve more at work, I have a high sense of fulfillment. Conversely, the days that I don’t do as well at work, I have a lower sense of fulfillment, even if I did a lot of other great things. A day with a bad presentation, even though I worked out and ate well and talked to my family, could still be an unfulfilled day, because I didn’t achieve or succeed at work — which is my long term goal.

This begs another question: does long term goal setting open a door for more opportunities for fulfillment on a daily basis? Or does it give you more opportunities to fail to achieve and subsequently feel less fulfilled on a daily basis?

For me, the best way to hash out this argument is by examining both sides.

Team-long-term-goal-setting-does-make-you-more-fulfilled: By setting multiple long term goals that can be worked on incrementally, you give yourself the opportunity to do more contextually meaningful activities on a daily basis. Contextually meaningful activities would essentially be activities that bring you closer to an overall goal — in context, all of these separate events have meaning. For example, you can make bread every day. You bake a loaf of bread every day just because you want to and those are independent events. The fact that I baked bread yesterday has nothing to do with the fact that I’m baking bread today. However, say I consciously make a goal to perfect the crust of my bread. Then, I’m baking bread every day with the purpose of improving my crust — the bread I made yesterday is relevant to the bread I’m making today because of the potential difference in the quality of the crust. This is all a circuitous way of saying that overall goals can thread together individual events into something more wholly meaningful or constructive than the sum of all the independent events. Baking bread every day for 30 days may result in 30 similar loaves, while baking bread every day for 30 days with the intention of improving the crust could result in 30 loaves with increasingly magnificent crusts. The value is greater than the sum of all parts.

Additionally, multiple long term goals give you the opportunity to do more meaningful things on a daily basis. Instead of acting on a whim with the time you have free, these goals can populate your day with activities that fulfill you — exercising and making healthy food with the goal of getting in shape, reading with the goal of completing x books per month, etc. Working towards these sorts of goals make the things you do on a daily basis more satisfying, because you see yourself improving or getting closer to the goal you’ve set for yourself.

Team-more-goals-more-failures: The rationale for this argument is rather simple: setting more goals gives you more opportunities to fail, and that can inevitably be worse and create a greater sense of meaninglessness. Today, I should create 10 slides at work, have a 1 hour workout, cook 2 meals, and read 50 pages of a book — based on my multiple long term goals. Say I accomplish none of that. Realistically, I would feel pretty bad. I failed at four separate things today; I failed to progress on four separate goals. However, if I didn’t have these goals, I would probably not feel that bad if I didn’t do all of those things — I wouldn’t have that expectation of myself, and therefore, I wouldn’t feel so unfulfilled as a result.

There is another third-party objection to the first argument — this goal-focused mindset doesn’t allow you to do things for the sake of doing them. There is a certain kind of sanctity related to doing something simply because you want to do it, not because of some ulterior motive. You should be able to read or cook or workout simply to enjoy that experience, rather than to always chugging towards an inevitable metric. There is an argument that this goal-centric mentality takes the spontaneity and experience out of doing something, reducing it simply to an intermediate step to something better.

Now, I’ll posit something pretty irritating: all three of these things are true. Classically considered a cop-out, I do think that all of these arguments have merit and can coexist without contradiction. My personal belief is a hybrid of all of the above.

1. Predominantly, I do think that having multiple goals can lead to a more fulfilling existence. It is a way to not only constructively improve yourself and your skills, it’s also a way to integrate little successes into your day to day life.
2. However, setting many difficult/time intensive/draining goals can backfire. If you continually struggle to meet these goals, if they make you feel like you’re failing more than you’re succeeding — you probably need to reevaluate. These goals need to be of different shapes and sizes, varying from something as big as learning everything about a specific field to something as small as knitting a scarf. Life should be a mosaic of diverse goals — in terms of size, effort, and skills.
3. A goal-setting mindset should not turn your life into a series of metrics. Don’t use this mentality to turn everything in your life into a goal — you should still be able to do things that you enjoy simply because the urge strikes you. An important of life is living in your experiences.

Understanding amorphous concepts can relate to our lives in very concrete and constructive ways. Understanding fulfillment, I think, is a crucial step towards creating more of it in your daily life.