How to Set Goals So You Can Achieve Them: A Strategic Approach to Life

AVAlexander Volchek

The main problem in a person's life is dealing only with short-term tasks and goals. You're on Alexander Volchek's channel, where I talk about scaling up. Scaling up means a person's development in business, in their personal state, in their spiritual life, in their family and health, and in everything connected with human life. It sounds like a sweeping, crowd-pleasing claim: we've identified the single biggest problem in a person's life. In reality, though, you keep trying to solve problems that you see as simple, short-term actions, and you want those decisions right now, those immediate decisions, to change your entire life. Very rarely are people able to recognize the cause-and-effect relationships: what will happen five, ten, twenty, or thirty years from now. Today we were discussing a situation and talking about how brilliantly someone explains how to build a business. Then you sit there and ask, “Where is that person now? What are they doing at this moment?” Five years ago, they were explaining how to build a business so brilliantly. What's their social position now? Where do they live? How do they feel? What's their mood, their state? What's their family like? What's happening around them?

Did they genuinely develop, or did they experience complete deterioration and emptiness because they were thinking in the short term: that they could resolve the situation right here, right now? In reality, they didn't see what would actually happen and weren't working on their main tasks and goals. What I'm talking about now comes, first and foremost, from looking at goals and tasks over a long span of time. A long span of time means I understand, I have a sense—or at least try to have a sense—of what will happen ten, twenty, or thirty years from now. At the same time, I look at what was already happening ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. I'm completely at ease with what happened twenty or thirty years ago. And I'm just as calm about the sense that thirty years from now may be a total unknown. It sounds like a contradiction: I said I understand what will happen twenty or thirty years from now, then said I apparently don't understand. That's the whole point. I understand that twenty or thirty years from now, an enormous number of aspects of my life will be unknown. I'm not deluding myself or setting goals and tasks on the assumption that I'll resolve some issue now and that will change my future situation: that I'll find the right job now and therefore won't have to work thirty years from now, or that I'll earn a lot of money now and therefore be able to start my own business.

A person starts thinking along these lines: “Wait, isn't the problem with thinking long-term that the world is terribly unpredictable right now? Anything can happen at any moment. You could lose your life; a war could start. There are enormous changes everywhere. And we're explicitly told we need to live right here and now.” I'm not suggesting—and I wasn't suggesting at the beginning—that you stop living here and now. When I said the main problem in a person's life is trying to resolve their short-term tasks, I meant that they have no sense of how this task and goal, or this short-term goal, connects with the next task or goal. How does it connect with their overall sense of their entire life? That's the fundamental structure. What's more, there's a total misconception. On the one hand, someone says, “I'll take certain actions so that things will be good for me in the future.” On the other hand, they say, “The world is changing enormously. I want to change something right here and now so I can benefit right now.” In effect, there's a double mistake that should, accordingly, pull in different directions. The person says, “I'll do something short-term. I need some quick action so something happens for me in the future, and some quick action so my situation changes right now.” So which is it: do you want something to happen in the future, or do you want your situation to change right now?

I suggest taking actions that affect today, that affect two years from now, three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now, thirty years from now, forty years from now. However long your life lasts, they affect it through to its end. That's the fundamental difference: how to act consciously, how to take actions connected with your entire life—again, your entire life. Short-term goals and tasks usually involve making certain spontaneous decisions. Should I quit my job or not? Very narrow, very narrow. If I quit, I suppose I'll need to find another job. If I don't quit, I don't really like the management, or I'm earning a little less money. That's very narrow thinking. Another way of thinking is this: over the next twenty years, I'd like to do work that fits within my values. I'd like to do work where I feel reasonably good overall. I'd like to do work that provides for my life in a normal, stable way. In general, I'm prepared to work, and to work a lot if necessary. In general, I'm prepared not to work if I don't need to. If circumstances in my life work out so that I'm not earning money, what would I like to spend those twenty or thirty years doing?

I'd like to do some kind of manual work. I'd like to work in sales. Or I'd like to try my hand at ten different professions. I'd like to do something that lets me travel the world. I'd like to do something that also allows my family to develop. I'd like to run my own business and build it with my friends. Or, in general, I'm prepared to do all kinds of things, including working for a corporation. It doesn't necessarily have to be my own business, for example. What exactly do I want to do? Broaden the range a little. Not from the position that I'll only do what I like: I liked planting flowers ten years ago, so why don't I start planting flowers? Not from that position. That kind of choice is very narrow, very limited, and always guaranteed to be short-term. Instead, think a little more broadly. Then I look at my current job and consider whether I like or dislike something about it, whether I need to change it—not simply on the basis of the immediate circumstances here and now, but in terms of how it fits strategically into my whole system. I look at whether changing jobs will make me feel better, if feeling better mattered to me, and whether changing jobs will allow me to find an entirely new job.

By changing jobs, I'll gain greater stability in terms of my professional development, for example. Or if I change jobs, I'll be able to try different professions. That example of different professions is actually very interesting. What should you do with your life? Develop in one profession, for example, or develop in fifteen professions? Where's the truth? Where's the truth: one profession or fifteen? Who should you listen to? The choice depends only on you. It depends on each person in their particular situation. Imagine someone has the opportunity to try different professions. Imagine circumstances in which many things are difficult to do. Again, someone will say, “You're making that choice because you have a particular opportunity. You don't know my opportunities, just as you don't know other people's.” Suppose that, overall, you probably can try different professions. And in today's world, a great many people definitely have the opportunity to choose different professions. I could probably go and get a job in a store selling flowers right now. I could probably start my own business now and hire a lot of people to do landscaping and sell flowers or other plants, for example.

I'm just using plants as an example. With flowers, I could probably start an online business in different countries. I could train for a new profession working with flowers. There are a huge number of directions I might want to take. I want to open, I don't know, a flower shop and sell flowers to individual customers. Or I want to open some kind of wholesale operation, for example. Do I want to do it alone or with someone else? Do I want a business with another person as its director, while I'm simply its owner and work on strategy? Or do I want to spend all day there myself? Do I want to build this business with my own money or borrowed money? How do I want to develop it at all? Am I prepared to work in this business without drawing a salary for a long time, or do I want to draw a salary for a long time? There are many different considerations. But again, it's a different profession. I've never worked professionally with flowers in my life. Someone wants to open a restaurant: they want to open a small restaurant where they'll work.

A small restaurant where they'll work themselves and devote the next fifty or a hundred years of their life to it. They'll work there all the time, teach their children there, and want their children to do it too. Or they want to open a restaurant that runs without them, that's fashionable, and where they can invite their friends. Or they want to open a restaurant so they can build a chain and then sell that chain of restaurants. Or they want to open a restaurant to avoid spending time at home: they simply want something to occupy them, something to do. Everyone's circumstances are completely different, and everyone has a different sense of who should do what. Completely different. That's an important aspect. For example, I don't direct my children's education toward a profession. I have four children, and I don't base their education on any of my own wishes about their professions at all. My oldest daughter is in high school. I live in the United States, in California, and she's in high school—in ninth grade. They devote a great deal of time to this there. Her school is on Stanford's campus, and the education is quite serious and rigorous. They spend a lot of time figuring out what professions they'll pursue.

We were recently looking at an assignment from her school: they were told to make a schedule for choosing different courses of study over the next four years. Depending on those courses, it will, of course, affect where they go to study afterward. Not entirely, but partly. There was an interesting point: one of the courses lasts a whole year and is about business. I think a huge number of people—I simply know a huge number of people, especially in the Russian-speaking community—would say you absolutely have to take that program. She would come to me from time to time and say, “Dad, you can study psychology here, and here it seems you need to go and work somewhere. You could work in a bakery, for example. Here you can study business, and here you can study fashion.” She was showing me different aspects of it. I was interested and asked questions. I can't say she was asking my advice, right? I was more the one asking how it worked and what was going on, because there were so many—a huge number of different factors involved, among other things. I told her, “Listen, you definitely don't need to take business.” She gave me a look. I said, “It would probably be better to take fashion or psychology, those subjects, or to study math more intensively.”

She likes intensive language study and choir. The next day, I was meeting a friend from San Francisco. Interestingly, he's never been in business. I've been in business for many years—seventeen now; in my own business, seventeen. Though I tried my first business twenty years ago. When we started, we tried selling phones. Actually, not twenty: we tried selling phones twenty-two or twenty-three years ago. My friend said, “Of course she doesn't need to study business, because she can always take that course later. Those aren't the skills she needs; those aren't the circumstances she needs.” That's how I approach my children as a parent. Some parents have made a decision for themselves and said, “I want my child to work in my business.” For example, someone has a restaurant in Italy and tells all their children, “When I die, you'll run this restaurant.” Their children and grandchildren work in it. The person dies, then they run it, then the next grandchildren. There's that rotation, right? We often know it as a family business in which absolutely everyone works.

Some parents push that initiative very strongly. Or someone is a scientist and says their child will be a scientist too; someone is a doctor, and the children will be doctors too. We all know it doesn't always work out that way. This very often leads to conflicts, because some parents push too hard, and some children enjoy studying while others don't. Whether someone becomes great has nothing to do with whether they enjoyed it or didn't enjoy it. These are very well-known cases. In music, in piano, there are famous pianists whose life stories have been documented: they were simply bullied into practicing. And there are famous, world-renowned pianists who always found joy in making music. There are musicians like that too. Understanding this whole picture and setting that way of thinking in motion when deciding whether to quit a job or not allows you to set good, sound, genuine short-term tasks now. Because when I said the main problem in life is living by short-term tasks and goals, I meant that the person sees nothing beyond those short-term tasks and goals. They aren't living their whole life twenty or thirty years ahead: their entire life, their whole professional life, the future of their whole family, their entire approach to interacting with their children, their whole approach to health.

As a result, a huge number of actions later fall apart. There are millions of examples around us: people say one thing, then three months later they say another, then a third, then a fourth, then a fifth, then a sixth. They said you should do it this way. Then it turns out you shouldn't. Then they said to do it that way, and you shouldn't do that either. So what are we looking at? Whose examples are we listening to? Most importantly, how do we hear ourselves? What do we hear within ourselves when making these decisions? How do we act? Do we act only in the short term, only in the long term, or do we take the whole picture into account and live our entire life? Let's talk a little about long-term thinking. What is long-term thinking, anyway? We all know it very well, especially in the Russian-speaking world. It's also very familiar in China, for example. It's when people say, “Study hard, and everything in your life will be good. Only if you study hard will you be able to find a good job. You have to work a great deal so you can be happy later. You have to do a great many things so you can live well later.” That's an illusion. The question is to keep looking at what we're doing it for. Couldn't we live well now, right here and now?

Does that really require you to forget for thirty years that short-term goals and tasks exist? So interpreting this topic, this video, only as me saying I'm against addressing short-term issues is, of course, not an accurate interpretation. I'm in favor of people living broadly, genuinely trying to recognize and understand what's really happening, what really lies behind the desire to make particular decisions. So that being in a state of analysis becomes a simple, easy thing to do. For some people, it will be important to do this for every task in their life, and it will happen for them. They'll be able to do it. Some people need to begin doing it for at least a few tasks. But there's no end to it. There is no end to development, to this way of living. Most importantly, this way of thinking is where you genuinely scale up, where you genuinely develop as a person. And there is the most important kind of scaling up: developing the aspects that truly, genuinely matter in your life. One more important point: from that state, you always have the opportunity to choose what matters more to you. I'd like to say that money isn't as important as health.

That your personal state isn't as important as your family's state; that your professional work is less important than your inner emotional state each day. But in reality, it's your choice. In this video, I'm not suggesting you make my choice, or your friend's or your brother's choice. I'm suggesting that you begin choosing for yourself, making your own particular choice and your own decisions. Please tell me in the comments how you live. Do you live by short-term goals, or only in an endless race toward long-term goals, like a squirrel running in a wheel? Write about that. Or write that you live in a state of balance, where you sense everything happening now and everything that will happen in the future. Where you can take it in stride that what you're working toward now may not happen, and that what lies in the future certainly may not happen either—or it may. Share that. It's very interesting. See you next time! I post here once a week, every Wednesday.