I thought about skipping goal-setting this year.

I'm good with whatever I have now. I can safely say that I've reached a point in my life where I no longer need anything else. Now, I'm not saying I no longer have any problems. I still have desires and dreams I want to pursue. But by embracing a minimalistic-kind of mindset, I avoid becoming a slave to my desires.

Now, since I feel like "I'm happy, and I don't need anything else", I decided to only have one main goal in life: to continuously improve at least 1% a day.

But I had a big oversight.

There are other areas in my life that I really need to put some effort into, such as strengthening my relationships with the people I deeply care about and earning more money.

Money has always been that thing I thought I had enough of, but Life always finds a way to slap me with the reality that I don't. While I'm ok with my current income to support my own family, I forgot that I belonged to the sandwich generation.

I, not only need to worry about my own family, but also worry about my ageing parents.

I thought about working more, but that might mean losing more time with my own family. It's a trade-off I'm not willing to do. It is during these times that get-rich-quick-schemes become very attractive. But I'm sane enough to remind myself that the only shortcut to success is hard work. However, working hard alone is inefficient if you don't have a plan.

This is why I'm back to goal-setting.

But goal-setting is not as easy as setting a to-do list. Nuh-uh. It requires a lot more hard (mental) work than I thought…

The S.M.A.R.T. approach is more applicable to "small" goals

The idea behind setting S.M.A.R.T. goals is great (and it works), but setting it up correctly is a challenge on its own.

Identifying the overall benefit of the goal you want to achieve is easy. What's hard is making it specific. The specificity relies heavily on your ability to imagine. And if you lack the imagination to define it, then perhaps you haven't thought about it hard enough.

This is where I get stuck almost all the time.

"Thinking is hard work. That may be the reason so few engage in it."

— Henry Ford.

How specific do you have to be to get it right?

The best resource I found on how to do this right was from Ramit Sethi.

I applied the advice and what I noticed is that the "S.M.A.R.T." approach is more applicable to "small" goals. The ones that are easy to define — realistic but not too challenging to achieve. But…my problem with mini-goals is that once I achieve them, I feel a little lost after. Something else feels missing.

This tells me that whatever goal I set is not "big" enough.

What does "big" in "Dream big" look like?

If you dream too big, you're unlikely to have the stamina to get there. That's one extreme most people probably belong to. But what if you're incapable of dreaming big?

"Think big, dream big, believe big, and the results will be big."

— Anonymous

I grew up in a lower-middle-class family in a third-world country, "dreaming big" is not something you should even dare to do. The scarcity mindset in me is strong. I learned how to be content with whatever I have, however small it is.

Desiring for more feels like a sin.

But I've learned how to outgrow that behaviour…bit by bit.

Chris Do has a YouTube video that helps you deal with that. It wasn't obvious then, but it's obvious now how the possibilities I can imagine are limited by my personal experience. Reading a book, watching a video or listening to rags-to-riches success stories may help conjure a brighter future, but deep inside, there's still a feeling that their future is theirs, not mine. Now that I live in a first-world country in North America, I can imagine more possibilities of a better future simply because the overall environment is not surrounded by poverty.

I still suck at "aiming higher" than what I consider realistic, but I learned a simple-but-takes-practice technique to increase the possibility of turning a big dream into reality.

Injecting emotions into your imagination is difficult when things are ok

I find vision boards to be lame, even when there's proof that it works.

However, I get the general idea of why it works — it's a constant reminder of what you want out of life. It's a convenient solution to avoid using your imagination. Because, again, imagination can use up a lot of your mental energy. But a visual board is an external source of motivation. What happens if you lose it?

A more effective solution is to mix your imagination with emotions.

I learned this from the book, "Think and Grow Rich".

This is more effective because it's "internal". You can summon it whenever, wherever. Your emotions have a strong influence on your subconscious mind. When you mix your big dream with strong feelings, you somehow push your brain to think of the best possible ways to achieve it. Most successful people out there have a story that consists of dark times but managed to power through it because their desire to be successful is stronger than the obstacle they are facing. These emotions or strong feelings of desire naturally show up when you're in a "tight" situation.

However, what if things are ok? What then?

I certainly don't want to put myself in a tight situation just so I can draw the emotions I need to succeed. That, to me, is stupid. The internet is a giant database for accessing the stories about successful people we want to be like. If I can draw motivation from external sources, then pair it up with action, I bet my chances of turning my dreams into reality is significantly higher.

This is where practice comes in.

"Practice" means, consistent planning, taking action, observation and iteration.

It's a skill that takes time to develop — not just a planning activity.

To sum it all up

Goal setting requires deep thinking, which, sucks the life out of your brain.

To counter that, you need to do it regularly, much like a muscle. The more you do it, the more feedback you acquire. The more feedback you acquire, the more lessons you learn, the better you become at seeing potential roadblocks to your plans. The better you are at identifying the roadblocks, the more efficient you are at managing your time and energy (mental and physical).

Your ability to set goals (just like any other skill) is developed through an iterative process —unlike a task list that rarely changes.