Recently, there has been a rise in the way people engage with the idea of setting goals, especially at the beginning of the year. Thanks to motivational speakers, influencers and religious leaders, most people are now singing from the same hymn about the wonderfulness of setting goals. The noise has grown so loud now that it is now becoming annoying.
Now, I am not against the idea of setting goals. I also set achievable targets regularly that I try to meet. However, the majority of people who set goals rarely achieve them. If setting goals is so effective, why are people falling short?
Honestly, there are more than a thousand reasons that can make people miss their targets. The easy one is to say the goal is not a SMART goal. Other things like taking action at the right time and being disciplined influence the rate of meeting targets. On one good day, as I ponder on the reasons why meeting my targets is proving elusive, I stumble upon a possible solution that has been lying in plain sight all along.
As I sat on the bed thinking about what I wanted, how to get it, and where to start, my mind gave me a brilliant suggestion: how about I start with what I don't want? As I listed down the things I don't want I realized that it streamlines with the things I want. If I can sort out those things I don't want, it will lead me to meet my targets. That was the overriding mindset I had when I quit my 9 to 5 job to go fully remote.
I have been working remotely for a while but having suffered some job losses I realised going fully remote may be risky, especially due to my location where a couple of things needed to thrive as a remote worker is restricted. A typical example is the continued restriction placed on PayPal accounts opened down here. Those accounts are as good as useless because one can't be paid with it. With PayPal being the trusted exchanger for most platforms, getting to work remotely can't be frustrating.
So, back to the 9 to 5 job. It wasn't a 9 to 5, it was more of a 7:30 to 5 on Monday to Thursday. I took the job to mitigate risk just in case my remote gig went to dust. I have traveled that path before and was incredibly lucky to find another remote gig within a month. In a bid to avoid opening myself to such reoccurrence, I kept my options open.
Some months into my offline gig I felt suffocated in the job. I was spending thrice as much time on it than I was spending on the remote gig while the remote gig was paying me three times what the offline gig did. With the realization that there was little room for improvement on the job, I asked myself a difficult question: Is this job what I want?
Well, I may not know everything I want, but I do know I no longer want the job. So I quit it to focus back on my remote gig. It was a risk because remote gigs can disappear without trace or compensation in an instant. However, I had to rid myself of a job that wasn't paying well despite eating up all my working hours.
Since then my income hasn't improved drastically, but I now have free time for other important life pursuits. And as far as I'm concerned, saying no to what I no longer want was the right move.
