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Ryan Paugh graduated from Penn State in 2006 with a Bachelor's Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business. After working in corporate communications, freelance writing and reporting, he co-founded 
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New here? Employee Evolution is a blog written by Ryan Healy. Ryan is a Co-Founder of Brazen Careerist, the webs #1 social network for young professionals. Ryan speaks with organizations on best practices for recruiting and retaining Generation Y and how to effectively use social media to reach your target market. To contact Ryan, please visit our contact page.
This post was originally written for Elysa Rice, proprietor of GenPink.
For an entrepreneur, learning to meet everyday goals is not just beneficial, it’s crucial. But when I think about goals in the broader sense, those mere milestones have nothing on the bigger picture of achieving my dreams.
We’re all reluctant to answer the question, “Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?” But we all have a vision of how we’d like our lives to play out. I’m looking forward to a beach house in Cabo, kicking it under a palapa and sipping on mojitos to my heart’s content. But let’s get real–fantasizing about our future success isn’t enough to get us there. As much fun as it is to imagine what our lives could be, it’s much more fun to live in the now, where life is actually happening.
During the past 24 years of my life I’ve had some big dreams for myself. From rocking out on stage as a lead musician to taking a role in my own T.V. show, I thought I could do it all. And maybe I could have. Who knows? But there are times in our life where we don’t even try. We don’t even plant the initial seed to see if we’re good at what we want to do. So our visionary goals are never met. And that sucks.
Fear can be the big inhibitor in these scenarios. The thought of failure can be petrifying and the post-failure perplexity of what to do next is too overwhelming to think about.
In my early college years I failed at being a film major, a field I was so certain would be my lifelong trade. Post-failure, I was so scared to choose something new. I didn’t want to craft a new goal that I was scared I wouldn’t achieve either.
But because life without goals is monotonous and boring, I chose to study journalism. I learned a lot and grew as a person. But it wasn’t going to be my end all be all. And since graduating college, I’ve learned that half the battle is all about planting that seed, looking for places where things will grow. When you do, don’t be afraid–reach in there and get your hands dirty.
Sure, your back might ache the next day and that seed, well, it may not even hatch. But that’s the risk you take when you try to become a harvester.
What we learn from our failed attempts is that maybe we need to approach things from a different angle. Maybe our fertilizer sucks, or maybe we shouldn’t even be farming to begin with. Either way we evolve, and our goals and dreams evolve too. That’s life.
Elysa:
You will be amazed where you are 10 years from now - and you will chuckle at how you felt even the slightest impulse to figure it all out.
You will find that eventually you are grateful for each failure, because there is usually something bigger and better waiting on the other side of it. If you didn’t fail the first thing, you wouldn’t get to experience the second. At times it sucks, but in the end you’ll be like “whoa, I remember what that GenerationXpert chick said back in ‘08 - and she was totally right.”
-GenerationXpert
GenXpert:
Thanks for the great comment. FYI, written by RP for Elysa…but that’s okay
To be honest though, I’m already amazed at how my failures have only made me stronger. Because as you say, those failures usually only lead to something bigger and better.
As long as we’re constantly looking to learn and grow (and willing to let our goals evolve too) than the experiences we place ourselves in will make our future selves that more likely to succeed.
-RP
Ryan,
Excellent post. Your willingness to share your own failures is a great, and very useful in sizing up our own feelings about our own accomplishments and failures. I strongly believe that the people who will become the most successful, are the people who will have more failures by number. It’s simple math: if you aren’t trying anything, you won’t fail at anything either. You also won’t learn anything.
I think, however, it is easy to become overzealous when one is striving towards one’s goals. And while I encourage people to put there all into whatever it is they choose to do, I always advise to maintain an awareness of one’s surroundings; especially of one’s bank account. But I suppose even that, sometimes, has to take a backseat to those motivated individuals who will stop at nothing to be on top.
-Todd Schultz
Great post, Ryan.
I can sort of relate to your situation. I’ve been burned by a few jobs in the past that seemed to be perfect and turned out far from it. It got to the point that I was a little trigger shy when considering accepting offers because I was afraid of finding myself in the same situation all over again.
But I recently realized that when an opportunity comes along that fits into your goals and dreams, it sudden becomes a lot easier to overcome whatever fear is holding you back and just go for it.
Thanks for sharing so truthfully.
I think you are right about fear. I started out as a physics major in undergrad and hated it after two semesters. But I was afraid, not just to change to something else I might not like, but also to “quit” something to begin with. I didn’t want to disappoint my professors and stayed in the degree for two years instead of switching right away. One day I finally realized that nobody was going to look poorly on me if I quit and I was just doing myself a disservice.
Failure is difficult, but maybe a bigger failure is to not reevaluate our goals regularly and be willing to let go of the ones that no longer apply.
Todd:
Absolutely, mind your surroundings (and your money!). But also trust your gut and know when you’re willing to go all in.
Jacqui:
I think it’s good to be a little trigger shy at first. As Todd points out, you have to mind your surroundings. But when you know something fits into your goals and dreams, you know. And nothing should hold you back.
Monica:
Yes! One of my biggest pitfalls is my unwillingness to let go. And it sometimes really screws me up when a new opportunity arises.
But you live and you learn. I’ve been working at this a lot lately and I think I’m getting much better.
Try shifting your thoughts from ‘failure’ to ‘what did I learn and how did I grow?’ I’d bet you set high goals, work your butt off to reach them and if you fall short, feel like you failed. Overachiever? I’m right there with ya!
As cheesy as it sounds, you may have not reached the goal (notice I didn’t put ‘fail’ here…shift your thinking!), but at least you tried. If you know you gave it 100%, then you didn’t fail. If you didn’t give 100%, then the question is ‘why not?’ Figure that out and use it to move on to something better. I would rather try something and find out the result, even if it’s not what I had hoped, than to not do it at all and wonder ‘what if…’ for the rest of my life.
btw–there’s always Rockstar Gomeroke for that dream of rocking out on stage.