Don’t Set Your Goals in Stone — Mold Them Like Clay

Take a moment to reflect on your goals. If you’re like us, they probably include getting your work done to a high standard, spending time with partners, friends and children, exercising, finding moments of mindfulness, eating well, and many other things large and small. It’s also common to have multiple goals that are in some degree of conflict; everything on the previous list competes for our time and resources.

Frequently, practical advice about work-life balance focuses on prioritizing. Consider the frequently used metaphor of rocks in the glass jar of life: put the big rocks (your most valued goals) in the jar first, or else the smaller (less important) rocks will take up all the space.

But this metaphor has flaws. The big rocks may not all fit, as author Oliver Burkeman notes. “The main problem…is that there are too many things that matter: too many tasks we pretty much have to accomplish in order to keep our jobs, pay the rent, be adequate parents, find a modicum of fulfillment, and so on,” he writes. “There are, in other words, too many rocks. And many of them are never getting near that jar.”

We have a more fundamental criticism of the tale of the jar of life: goals aren’t rocks. In fact, they’re more like balls of soft clay that require molding as much as prioritizing. In this article, we will outline our research-based strategy for molding your goals over time to better reach them. The first step involves identifying which of your values underpins each goal. Then, you can identify how you define success for each value. Your third step is to evaluate each definition. Finally, you can mold your values depending on your situation and what’s most important to you at the current moment.

HOW TO RESHAPE YOUR GOALS OVER TIME

IDENTIFY THE VALUES THAT UNDERPIN YOUR GOALS.

To get at what really matters, you need to move beyond specific goals and focus on values, which are important, high-level goals. For example, running a marathon is a goal that may fulfill the values of health or a challenging accomplishment. Coaching your child’s soccer team is a goal; being a good parent is a value. Earning a promotion by age 30 is a goal; having fulfilling work is a value. And so on.

However you think about the nature of a good life, values are important. Our research has led us to a theory that makes values absolutely central. According to this Value Fulfillment Theory, an empirically updated version of a long-standing popular theory in philosophy, a well-lived life is one in which you fulfill or uphold your important values. So, to live well, first ask yourself, “What values do I have?”

If you’re not sure where to start, there are many good resources for identifying and clarifying your values. One helpful exercise is to relax in whatever way works best for you and then look back at your life to find the times when you felt the best. Ask yourself what you were doing at that time and who were you with? If all those times involve running races, for example, competition may be a value for you. If those times are spread evenly between challenging yourself at work and spending time with your kids, you may value work, family, and balance.

DEFINE SUCCESS FOR EACH VALUE.

Once you’ve identified a handful of key values, ask, “What defines success for each value? What do these values mean to me, specifically?” Some definitions of success are concrete and easy to articulate — for example, achieving a specific promotion or salary in a certain time frame.

Others may be hard to pin down precisely, like cultivating an audience, making an impact, or being a good parent or friend. To better refine these, consider who you admire or envy and ask yourself: What are they achieving or experiencing that I see as genuinely worthwhile and wish I could also experience? For example, your feelings of admiration for a parent who manages to attend important events in his child’s life (baseball games, dance recitals) without being a perfectionist about parenting may tell you that one of your definitions for success is self-compassion. Your feelings of envy for a successful author may point toward having a large number of followers on social media, getting a book contract, or just having a creative outlet as a definition of success.

There’s no exact recipe for the right definition for each value. People are different and reflection won’t lead everyone to the same place. One person who values competitive sports may think this means winning, another may care more about participation and teamwork. One person who values family may understand this as requiring providing financial support for struggling family members, while another thinks of it entirely in terms of raising healthy children. By determining what matters to you, you can better position yourself to understand how to mold your values depending on what will work for you at a given stage in life.

EVALUATE YOUR DEFINITIONS OF SUCCESS.

Once you have identified the definitions that are guiding your sense of success, the next step is to consider whether those definitions are appropriate for you at this moment in time. You can do this by identifying definitions that don’t serve your values or fit well with your personality or circumstances, in three key ways.

First, ask: What is the source of each definition? To what extent is it motivated by external expectations or norms? Often, the definitions of success we use are dictated by cultural or industry norms; they aren’t necessarily definitions that we chose because they are good for us or fit our values. We may have unreflectively absorbed some of them from external sources such as organizational, industry, or cultural norms, or family expectations. For example, if you’re striving to have an impact as a writer, achieving a large social media following seems like an obvious definition of success. Cultivating an audience by having a certain number of followers on social media may facilitate a sense of generativity in your work and/or financial security. On the other hand, upon deeper reflection this definition may just be linked to popularity, and this may not be something you value deeply. Not all outside influences are negative, but if we can’t identify deeply held values that our definitions are serving, this may be a sign that there are more appropriate definitions to be found.

Second, you can examine how your definitions fit your personality. For example, the path to a promotion might require managing teams of people, which really leaves you cold. Research shows that intrinsic motivation — doing something because you enjoy doing it — is associated with greater feelings of fulfillment and greater success in goal pursuit than more extrinsic forms of motivation (doing something for a reward or to avoid punishment). So, changing your definitions so they fit who you are and what you really enjoy not only helps fit your values together, it also makes you more likely to succeed on your own terms.

Finally, your definitions can also be a bad fit with the period of life you’re in. If you value parenting, the needs of your children at different ages may change the shape of what good parenting means. If you really value getting to the top of a particular career ladder, there will be a certain period of your life in which other non-career values will have to bend to fit. For instance, when striving toward a particular career accomplishment, valuing parenting may mean attending some of your kid’s soccer games rather than coaching all of them.

Importantly, you should not see these accommodations as permanent. Values can shrink or stretch at different stages of life as your circumstances change. Understanding this flexibility and developing a regular habit of reflection can help you see where your values need to change shape yet again. Often, it is helpful to ask friends to help you reflect on how well your values fit you. Their outside view on your life can help correct your self-deceptive resistance to acknowledging the signs that your values aren’t working for you in a particular season of your life.

IMPROVE YOUR DEFINITIONS.

Improving your definitions is how you shape the clay – this is the way you change the shape of your values to reduce conflict. Once you see how you define success and how these definitions connect (or don’t) to who you are and what you really care about, you can think about whether it’s possible to change them. Ask: Are there different ways you could think about your definitions of success that are more achievable and more compatible with your values, your circumstances, and your personality? For example, reflecting on different ways you could achieve meaningful professional contributions, you may be able to identify criteria other than the ones promoted by our culture (making money, getting promoted). For example, being part of a team, mentoring others, or being part of producing something you are proud of may actually fulfill a value while creating less tension with other values you have, like family and mental health.

Of course, molding your definitions isn’t always easy. For instance, if a new parent in a demanding career really values being present at all school events, they may have to reshape their definition of career success by, for instance, embracing a slower promotion timeline. The point is that it is helpful to reframe this reflection as “shaping” career goals rather than “giving up”: you are opting for different, not settling for less.

The strategy of reinterpreting our definitions of success acknowledges that what it means to fulfill any given value is to some extent up to us. Exploring that flexibility, especially the ways in which you may be unreflectively holding yourself to external or cultural definitions of success that aren’t necessary, can reveal new ways of fitting your conflicting goals together. It’s not always easy to forge something new, and culturally reinforced definitions can have quite a hold, but the benefit is that you can have a life that is more satisfying and successful, less hampered by feelings of sacrifice and failure.

+++

Thinking of goals as rocks leads to rigid thinking. The metaphor of molding clay highlights our agency, our flexible brains, and the possibilities for change. As Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu is quoted as saying, “Your life is a piece of clay; don’t let anyone else mold it for you.”

———

Lauren Kuykendall is an Associate Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at George Mason University. Her research explores organizational and individual strategies for promoting well-being.

Valerie Tiberius is the Paul W. Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. Her most recent book is What Do You Want out of Life?: A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters (Princeton University Press, 2023).