What Are Life Goals? And Why They Don’t Need to Be Huge

When we hear the words “life goals”, it’s easy to picture the big things. Buy a house. Build a successful career. Travel the world. Start a business. Become financially independent. Write a book. Run a marathon. They’re the kinds of goals that are easy to recognise because they usually have a clear outcome and often come with a lovely sense of achievement when we finally reach them. You either bought the house or you didn’t. You took the trip. You started the business. You crossed the finish line.

But I think life goals can be much broader than that. A life goal can certainly be something you’d like to achieve, but it can also be an experience you’d love to have, something you’d like to learn, a change you want to make or even a way you’d like your everyday life to feel. You might want to spend more time with your family, become confident managing your money, learn Italian, have a home people love coming to, work fewer days, take your mum somewhere she’s always wanted to go, start painting again or feel strong enough to do a walking holiday in your seventies. Some of those things have a clear finish line and others don’t, but I think both belong in a conversation about life goals.

Perhaps that’s where our definition of a goal needs to become a little less rigid. We don’t need to turn every thought into something measurable before we’re allowed to take it seriously. Sometimes a life goal begins much more simply as something you realise you’d genuinely like to have, experience or make room for in your life.

What actually counts as a life goal?

There are plenty of formal definitions of goals, but I prefer to think about them quite simply. A life goal is something you’d like to move towards because you believe it would add something meaningful to your life. That might mean achieving something significant, but it could just as easily be an experience, a change, a feeling, a skill, a relationship, greater freedom, more security or simply a different way of spending your time.

Sometimes the goal will be very specific. You might want to save $30,000 towards a house deposit, pay off your credit card by the end of the year or complete a particular qualification. At other times, the first version of a goal may be much less defined. You might simply realise that you’d love to feel more confident about money, have more creativity in your life or find a way to work that leaves you with more time. Those thoughts may eventually lead to something much more specific, but I don’t think they need to start there.

That’s one of the reasons goal setting can become unnecessarily difficult. We hear so much about goals needing to be specific, measurable and attached to deadlines that we can start believing a thought doesn’t qualify unless we already know exactly how we’re going to achieve it. Those tools can be incredibly useful when you’re ready to take action, but before a goal becomes a plan, it often begins as nothing more complicated than I’d really like that to be part of my life.

And I think that’s enough for a beginning.

Life goals can come from every part of your life

Another reason life goals can feel intimidating is that we tend to associate them with a handful of fairly predictable areas. Career, money, property, health and perhaps travel. Those things matter, but our lives contain so much more than that, and some of the goals that ultimately make the biggest difference to how our lives feel may not fit into those conventional categories at all.

You can have goals for your relationships. Perhaps you’d like to create more family traditions, make more time for old friends or take a particular trip with someone you love. You can have goals for your home that have nothing to do with buying a more expensive property. Maybe you’d like to renovate, move somewhere different, grow a garden, simplify what you own or finally create one room that feels completely like you. You can have goals around learning and curiosity too. A language, ceramics, photography, cooking, history, investing, gardening or something you’ve always wondered about for no practical reason whatsoever.

Then there are creative goals, financial goals, travel goals, health goals, family goals and work goals, alongside goals that are simply about enjoying life a little more. Maybe you’d like to have more weekends away, read again, entertain friends more often, spend less time on your phone or finally learn to make really good pasta. None of those things needs to transform your life to be worth wanting.

In fact, I think one of the most useful things about thinking broadly about life goals is that it reminds us that a good life isn’t created in one area. You can be doing incredibly well at work and still feel as though something is missing. You can have financial goals while also wanting more adventure, creativity or connection. We are allowed to want different things from different parts of our lives at the same time.

Some goals are really about how you want to live

This is where I think the idea of a goal becomes particularly interesting, because not everything that matters has a finish line. You might have a goal to be a good friend. That was actually something I found written in the little goal notebook I kept in my twenties, and I love seeing it now because there’s no point at which I could ever have ticked it off and written “done”. It isn’t something you achieve once. It’s something you keep trying to be.

The same could be true of wanting adventure in your life, having a close relationship with your children, staying curious as you get older, creating a home where people feel welcome or maintaining friendships that matter to you. These are less like achievements and more like directions. They influence the choices you make over time without necessarily giving you one final moment when you can declare the goal complete.

I think we need room for those goals too, because if we only count things we can achieve and tick off, we leave out an enormous part of what actually makes a life feel good. Some of the things we value most are ongoing. There may never be a point when you’ve had enough meaningful time with your family, learned enough, been a good enough friend or created all the memories you’re going to want.

Perhaps some life goals aren’t really destinations at all. They’re reminders of how we’d like to live while we’re getting wherever else we’re going.

Small goals still count

We also have a tendency to rank goals according to size. Starting a business sounds like a serious goal, while learning to make bread somehow doesn’t. Buying a house qualifies, while having friends over for dinner once a month feels too ordinary. But if something adds pleasure, connection, confidence, curiosity or meaning to your life, I don’t think it needs to be enormous to deserve a place on your goals list.

Sometimes a relatively small goal has an outsized effect. You decide to join a class because you’d like to learn something new and end up meeting a completely new group of people. You make a goal of taking one weekend away every few months and suddenly feel as though you’re having more adventures. You decide to walk every morning and discover you have more energy for everything else. You start inviting people over without waiting until the house is perfect and find that your friendships become closer because you’re actually seeing each other.

None of those goals sounds particularly dramatic when you first write it down. That’s part of what I like about them. We can’t always predict which changes will make the biggest difference to our lives, and we shouldn’t dismiss something simply because it looks small on paper.

A goal doesn’t have to transform your life to be worthwhile. Sometimes it simply needs to add something good to the life you already have.

Big goals don’t automatically matter more

Of course, there will also be times when you want something enormous, and there is nothing wrong with ambition. Maybe you do want to build the company, write the book, buy the dream home, make a huge career change or spend a year travelling. A big goal can give you an extraordinary sense of direction and purpose, particularly when it represents something you’ve wanted for a very long time.

But size isn’t what gives a goal its value. A goal matters because of what it means to you.

For one person, becoming CEO might represent the career they’ve spent twenty years building and something they genuinely want. For somebody else, the goal might be leaving a senior role so they can work three days a week. One person dreams about buying a bigger house while another person, already living in one, dreams about downsizing and having fewer things to maintain. Someone wants to travel constantly, while someone else has travelled enough and would genuinely love to stay home, grow tomatoes and know exactly where they’ll be next Saturday.

None of those goals is automatically more worthwhile because it sounds more ambitious from the outside. We all want different things, and even our own definition of a good life will change as we move through different stages of it.

The useful question isn’t “Is this goal big enough?”

It’s “Do I actually want it?”

Your life goals are allowed to be completely ordinary

I think there’s something quite freeing about giving ourselves permission to want ordinary things. A beautiful bedroom. Enough money in the bank that an unexpected bill doesn’t cause panic. Sunday lunch with family. A dog. A vegetable garden. Time to read. Learning to swim properly. Seeing more of your friends. Taking one lovely holiday each year. Being able to help your children financially. Feeling comfortable cooking dinner for people.

These might not make particularly impressive answers if somebody asks where you see yourself in five years, but they can make an enormous difference to how your actual life feels. And perhaps that’s worth remembering when we’re thinking about what success is supposed to look like. Most of our lives aren’t lived during the big milestone moments. They’re lived in the weeks between them, on ordinary mornings and ordinary Tuesdays, in our homes and around tables and in the conversations we have with people we love.

A good life probably needs some goals for those days too.

That doesn’t mean abandoning the bigger dreams. You can want the extraordinary trip and also want to make your everyday home nicer. You can have a huge career ambition and still want to get better at having proper weekends. We don’t need to choose between having meaningful long-term goals and caring about the quality of ordinary life.

Both can belong on the same page.

A goal doesn’t have to be ready yet

Another distinction I think is worth making is between having a goal and actively working on a goal. You can want something without being ready to pursue it, and you don’t have to immediately turn every idea into a plan simply because you’ve written it down.

Perhaps you’d love to travel for several months, but you have school-aged children and it doesn’t make sense right now. Maybe you want to change careers but can’t afford to reduce your income at this stage. You might dream about moving somewhere completely different one day but know you aren’t ready to leave where you are. The goal can still exist.

You don’t need to delete it simply because it isn’t practical this year, and you don’t need to make yourself feel guilty every time you see it written down. Some goals belong to now. Others belong to later. Some may sit quietly on a page for years before you decide whether you want to do anything about them at all.

That’s one of the reasons I prefer thinking about life goals rather than only yearly goals. Life is longer than the planner, and some of the things we want need somewhere to wait.

Your goals should change because you change

The goals you have today also don’t need to become permanent obligations. What you want at 25 may not be what you want at 45, and what feels important at 45 may look completely different at 65. There are decades of living in between, and of course those years are going to change us.

You gain experience. Your circumstances change. People come into your life and sometimes people leave it. Priorities move. Something you thought would make you happy doesn’t. Something you never expected to care about becomes incredibly important. You learn what you’re good at, what you enjoy, what you don’t want to tolerate anymore and what matters much less than you once thought it did.

Of course your goals will change.

I don’t think changing your mind means you’ve failed at a goal. Sometimes it simply means you know yourself better now than you did when you wrote it.

That’s why I think life goals are worth revisiting rather than simply setting. Not to judge how much progress you’ve made or to give yourself a score, but to ask a much more useful question: Does this still belong to me?

If it does, keep it.

If it needs to change, change it.

And if it doesn’t matter anymore, you can let it go.

You don’t need a goal for everything

Once you start thinking across all the different areas of your life, it’s very easy to go too far in the other direction and decide you now need a goal for every one of them. You don’t. You don’t need ten goals, you don’t need five, and you certainly don’t need to make a goal out of every part of yourself.

There will be areas of your life that are perfectly fine as they are. There will be things you enjoy without wanting to improve them. There will be periods when one goal deserves most of your attention and everything else can simply continue in the background.

The purpose isn’t to turn your entire life into a self-improvement project.

It’s to notice the things that genuinely matter enough that you’d like to give them some thought, and perhaps somewhere to live outside your head.

So, what are life goals?

For me, a life goal can be almost anything that represents something you’d genuinely like to move towards. It might be something you want to achieve, an experience you want to have, something you’d love to learn, a change you’d like to make, a relationship you want to nurture, greater financial security, more freedom, better health, a creative idea, a place you’d love to go or simply a way you’d like your ordinary life to feel.

It could be something enormous that takes twenty years or something small that you could start this weekend. It might be measurable or difficult to measure at all. It may eventually become a detailed plan, or it might remain a direction you keep coming back to. It could be something you’re ready to start now or something you want to keep safely in the “one day” category for a while longer.

When I created A Life in Goals, I wanted there to be room for all of those things. Not only the impressive goals, not only the things that can be measured and not only the goals that are ready to happen now. I wanted somewhere for the bigger picture, because a life isn’t built entirely from enormous achievements.

It’s built from thousands of ordinary days, the people we spend them with, the things we’re curious about, the experiences we make room for and the choices we gradually make about what matters.

Your goals can reflect all of that.

So if you’re trying to work out what your life goals should be, perhaps don’t begin by asking yourself what enormous thing you ought to achieve next. Start somewhere much simpler and give yourself permission to answer without worrying about whether the result sounds ambitious enough.

What would I genuinely love to have more of in my life?

The answer doesn’t need to be huge.

It just needs to be yours.