How Pragmatism would Help you in Achieving your Goals

Set Goals that work – Use the pragmatism approach!

Have you ever found yourself setting goals and not achieving them? Or does it seem as if you ain’t achieving anything despite the goals being set?

Then probably you have been setting goals that don’t have a practicable end – goals with just your mere thoughts of it being possible.

There was a time I set a goal that looks all captivating and it ends up messing up. I found out later that I haven’t been really setting workable goals; just my mere thoughts, and fantasies!

Dreaming big is very important to every human. These big dream sometimes comes out as a fantasy to you or the people who hear them. The journey to prove these people wrong and to achieve this dream is where a lot miss it. We sometimes jump steps that we ought to go through.

Before setting your goals, especially a visionary goal, you have got to check out their pros and cons and how it is going to work out best for you. This is the goal of Pragmatism.

Something that works!

Or better put, the journey of carefully planned activities to make it work!!

Watch this Video

The first step to achieving your goals is to discover what exactly is important – to discover your Pain Point. But a lot of times, our goals are always on the wrong thing. This video explains the best way to go about it

PLEASE NOTE: Plug in your earpiece or earpod. This video is one of the modules of our exclusive course on how to create one year plan.   

In this article, we will review some tips to improve our efficiency in goal-achievement and implementation. In other words, we will see how to be more pragmatic in our daily life.

Also, I am going to show you how being pragmatic can help in achieving most of your goals. You will get to know what it entails and I assure you that once you make good use of them, you are going to achieve more! Let’s go.

What is Pragmatism

Etymologically, the word pragmatism is derived from the Greek word ‘Pragma’ which means activity. Some other scholars say that it is derived from the Greek word ‘Pragmatikes’ which means ‘practicability’.

Proponents of this are some Philosophers known as pragmatists. They came up with the word and gave different views on Pragmatism but the bottom line is that: ‘everything should be aimed at its practicability’. We have C. S. Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, among others who were its major proponents.

There are two essential elements of pragmatism which include practical learning, which focuses on the application of the curriculum in the real world, and experiential learning, which involves learning through experience.

Pragmatism prioritizes what is taught and practiced. It prioritizes action. It prefers a practical rather than a theory-based teaching and learning process.

Pragmatists have completely abandoned traditional teaching methods and emphasized the invention of new methods. In other words, you can’t say you know something without it working for you and others around you.

Since we are talking about pragmatism, let’s see an example

Let’s say you are talking to a group of people about the importance of keeping good hygiene. After the session, they must be able to keep that good hygiene and ensure they stay healthy. This is why, while you set your goals, you have got to make sure it is what has a workable end. – just like one of our exclusive courses on how to create a one-year plan. You should get it.

Don’t be discouraged if you have had failed goals. Achievers don’t ever give up. 

Let me cite another example here.

I was to do a particular project in my Community Development Service, CDS group during my National Youth Service Corp, NYSC program and I had it as part of my to-do list before ending the program. I had to rally around and make inquiries about it from people who have had similar projects done in the past and it came out successful. This is what an actionable goal entails.

Pragmatism expresses the subject’s ability to follow the procedure effectively and regularly; avoiding procrastination and delays.

Why set Goals?

There are so many reasons as to why we need to set our goals, you might probably have yours at heart but here are some reasons:

1.  Goals provide clarity and direction: goals provide direction and help us focus on what really matters. With your goals set, you already know what you want to achieve. It is even possible to combine two-time consuming skills if there’s clarity and direction.
2. It reduces the risk of achieving nothing: goals would help give your work meaningfulness because you already know what you want to achieve. It would even help you in unnecessarily procrastinating.
3. It helps you stay motivated: with your goals set and previous ones achieved, you are encouraged to get to work so as to move on to the next.
4. It helps you stay productive: setting goals would help you think outside the box and make you innovate new ideas. Hence, bringing about productivity.
5.  To get your priorities right: Setting goals would help in getting your priorities right. With your goals, you already know what is important – from the hardest of tasks to the simplest.

However, it is not enough just to set goals without it being workable in the end especially when it’s a long-term one.

For example, if one of your goals is to build a public toilet in a rural community. But you haven’t made proper research as to what they need most in the community. You also didn’t have a plan for proper orientation as to how to maintain it and for the monetary aspect, you don’t even know how to come about the finances for this to be achieved. Yet, you just embarked on the project – without proper research into how your goal can be achieved.

This is why Pragmatism is very important.

How to use pragmatism in goal setting

• Setting goals is an act of pragmatism 

 Yes, because it is at the heart of Pragmatism. When you set goals, you are making a structure of the objectives that you must fulfill – one after the other. With that, you are having a practicable thought and action.

• Commitment

To achieve an acceptable level of pragmatism, it is very important to commit to what you want to achieve, and then you will be able to find the best way to do it efficiently;  a way you can implement the plans without major issues.

• Make enough research

When you are looking for a pragmatic method to carry out your goals, it is necessary to make your findings very well. Check whether that method has been used in the past, and the results it has given people in the same or similar situations. These would help you avoid disappointing results.

But there are times that the methods that worked well for others don’t work for you, this is where you put on your creativity cap and make up a solution that will work for you.

• Learn from mistakes

No one is free from making mistakes at some point because we are all humans. Even when we take precautions not to, something could always go wrong. The ideal thing is not to keep on ruminating on our mistakes but to learn where things went wrong and avoid them some other time.

What makes a great entrepreneur is not about being perfect It is the speed at which you learn from the mistakes

Reid Hoffman

• Plan ahead

Time as you know waits for no man and so we should learn to plan our goals. Time is a determining factor in achieving our goals. It is important that we schedule a time for each of our goals to avoid delay.

Watch this Video

In this video, you will learn how to create a time for anything important to you. You will be able to create a time that no one will be able to distract you. It is called a ‘Me Time’

PLEASE NOTE: Plug in your earpiece or earpod. This video is one of the modules of our exclusive course on how to create one year plan.  

• Evaluate the feasibility of your goals 

Regardless of whether they are short, medium, or long term goals, it is important to evaluate the feasibility of all of them to avoid the frustration of not being able to carry out your projects after investing a great deal of time in them just as the example I made earlier on of a goal to build a public toilet in a rural community.

In Conclusion

Many times people fail to achieve their goals because they don’t know how to organize themselves properly; this is because to achieve one’s goals, its not enough to think about them or hope for them, you need to put them into practice in a feasible and structured way.

    More so, people with pragmatic behavior are able to achieve a lot in life; they look for ways to achieve their goals in practical ways and avoid taking uncalculated or unreasonable risks. Like I said earlier they plan ahead, make enough research and get things done per time.