goals or idols

​GOALS or IDOLS
 
Goals (inserts typewriter noise), as defined by dictionary.com, is the object of a person's ambition or effort; an aim or desired result. Everyone’s goals differ depending on who you are and what stage you are at in life currently. In society today we often refer to many types of goals such as hair goals (whether you’re 1A or 4C I’m here for all types of hair), relationships goals (usually you hear Beyonce and Jay-Z as a top pick but I’m going to throw in Chrissy Teigen and John Legend because their one of my personal favorites), money goals (whether you want to be as rich as Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates or just to have a savings account, and life goals (Retired at 40, married with kids and the house)
We look to these things and people because we deem it or them as worthy of respect and regard it as impressive aka admiration. Once this admiration or love towards a person or thing it becomes excessive we often idolize people or things without even realizing it. We fixate on other people’s successes and “perceived” (I put that in quotes purposely because social media has a great way of making momentary events people's everyday lives.) lifestyles and make them our goals rather than studying the process of how they got to certain points of success and applying it to our personal lives. In order to be successful in any process you have to apply the principle to your current situation. We all come from different backgrounds, teaching and environments. Picture this for a moment, we are all cookies that have the potential to taste great once all of the ingredients are added and we bake in the oven. No one cookie (person) is the same but all of the same ingredients (principles, life lessons, keys to success) are needed to make a great cookie. Based on your background, previous experiences, etc. some of us have a little bit more flour than others or even less chocolate chips than others. So taking one ingredient (principle) and adding it to the cookie (person) without evaluating and applying it to  what the cookie already has  can be a set up for failure and a bad tasting cookie (but back to the main point because now i want some chocolate chip cookies).
Admiring people and wanting to reach the same level as success as a person is not a bad thing and having great examples in front of you to encourage you to pursue your goals and dreams is a great thing. But to idolize a person or concept can become a false notion or fallacy. (Peep the SAT vocabulary here. Please look this word up in your spare time if you don’t know the definition) Some people think that success is overnight, which it can be, but any real overnight success would tell you that overnight successes are rarely overnight. They’ve been working hard in the shadows for a while and are just receiving the recognition. One of the downfalls of people trying to skip the process to success (Side note: success is whatever success means to you. It looks different for everyone) is that impatience causes us to arrive places premature (and immaturely ) as well as unprepared because we skipped the process and the lessons that come along with it (such as discipline, patience and perseverance) that allows us to maintain success once achieving it.
So all of this to say the process of success is more important than the end goal of success and that we often create idols of people who have reached certain levels of success and call it “goals” rather than learning the process and applying it to our everyday life. So next time your eating chocolate cookies and you taste a cookie that probably was missing a little something or just quite didn’t meet your expectations think of this post.