It’s a question that we all wrestle with when it comes to planning our financial futures…

“How am I supposed to know with any certainty what I want 10, 20, or 30 years from now?”

You probably want to be able to retire at some point, take some trips along the way, maybe fix up the house, and help get the kids through college. But do you feel confident putting dates and dollar figures to all of these goals, let alone prioritizing them relative to each other?

Probably not.

Well, allow me to help you tackle this conundrum.

You aren’t supposed to know what you want in the future with any certainty.

Please take a deep breath and let that sink in for a moment. Go ahead, I’ll wait. 

Now, the reason you aren’t supposed to know what you want in the future with any certainty is because it’s not possible! We are all perfectly imperfect human beings whose wants and needs naturally change and evolve over time. Once we accept that we can’t know with any certainty what our future goals should be, the question then becomes what can we do instead.

If we can’t know what we’ll want 10, 20, or 30 years from now with any certainty, the next best thing we can do is to make our best guesses and start working towards them.

When you remove the burden of having to set the “right” goals and instead focus only on making your best guesses, it suddenly becomes much easier to get started. And once you get started, you begin to experience the true benefit of the goal setting process.

Defining your current and future goals is not about attaining the specific goals themselves. Remember, they are likely to change over time. Rather, the true benefit is the financial flexibility and sense of autonomy we gain along the way by intentionally working toward those goals even though we know they will change.

Or put another way: we benefit more from the journey itself, not the specific destination. 

So the next time you find yourself questioning whether or not you’ve got the “right” goals, it can be helpful to remind yourself that there’s no such thing. Then go ahead and proceed to make your best guess anyway. Doing so allows you to start taking action — and those actions are what build the financial flexibility and autonomy we all crave as perfectly imperfect human beings.