An electric Eurovision song about mother nature and your relationship with goals (weekly wrap #19)
A bit of pop culture and a bit of self-reflective philosophy - not a bad combination.
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Welcome to another weekly wrap. I’ve been pretty sick past few days so this is going out later than my usual schedule and is going to be on the lighter side too.
That said, I figured it’d be a good opportunity to invite you to check out some of my previous weekly wraps if you haven’t.
Something I’m listening to and watching
I’m not a Eurovision guy, but if you know me you’ll know I have some strong connections with Europe and Poland in particular. So I was happy to see that this year’s entry from Poland is not only phenomenal in my opinion but also blowing more regular followers of the Eurovision song contest away with the electrifying energy and power of its performance. Particularly the semi-finals performance of the song. It’s a feast for the eyes, not just for the ears.
Oh and Justyna Steczkowska is 52 years old!
Something I listened to and have been pondering
Goals, and the art of designing and relating to them (rather than just pursuing them) is something I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about over the years. My relationship with goals and goal-setting is very… umm… on-again-off-again is perhaps the best way I can put it.
This relatively short (32 minutes) conversation on the Art of Accomplishment podcast (one of my default pods I listen to) about goals and goal setting really resonated. In particular, I love this thing Joe said:
… but also internally what I’ve noticed is that I’ve lived life with the rejection of goals - “I don’t need goals, I’m just going to enjoy myself in the moment.” - not recognising that enjoying myself in the moment was the goal.
Bringing the goal to consciousness, there’s a benefit to that.
There’s also a downside. The downside is that now I’m going to beat myself up and have shame if I don’t have the goals.
So it’s really about how you relate to the goals rather than if you have them or not because everybody has them.
And for me, how you relate to a goal is gently, with a lot of love, and with awe and wonder, and not through being defined by it.
Joe goes on about this deeper, including on the point that the point of goals is not only to achieve them. A couple of minutes later he poses an important question (well a set of questions) that I’ve been pondering more too.
Are your goals helping you feel more connected with yourself or not (your personal goals)?
Are the goals in the company helping you feel more connected to the company or not?
If they’re not, then there’s a way to make those goals better. There’s a way to face those goals, to appreciate those goals, to work with those goals that is far more meaningful. Because that’s what the goals do for me and for this company.
Really worth listening to the whole thing, but even if you don’t, I invite you to have a think not about your goals, but about your relationship with goals in general.
And for what it’s worth, here are some things I’ve written about goals and goal setting in the past:
Something I’m proud of
Although I’ve had to push back a couple of scheduled podcast recordings I had that I was very excited about, because I got sick, I’m so glad to have released this one since my last wrap.
This is very much aligned with the pondering of your relationship with your goals too, and I hope you’ll let me know how you like it if you do. You can also watch the video if you so prefer (or find the podcast on any app you listen to your podcasts on).
If you’d like to come on the podcast for a chat, or want to recommend someone I should have on, please email me to let me know.
I’m going to leave it at that for now.
Hey by the way, if you’re not already following or connected with me on LinkedIn come find me there. As cringe as I know it can be, I’m moderately active there and share some different things on there too.
Hope you have a nice weekend.
Dev