January is a good time for setting goals. Goals for the new year, goals for life... Short, medium and long term objectives that we want to achieve.

The process that we decide to take in order to achieve the goal is something interesting to be analyzed, specially because we have different ways of achieving the same goal.



The best case scenario is when we want to achieve a goal and we enjoy the process of achieving that.

I tried to find pictures of "good stuff" to represent a "good process" :) Forget about the junk food results when you look at the hot dog, burger and icecream... :)

Unfortunately that doesn't happen always. Sometimes we have the situation described by the picture below. The path we need to take to achieve the goal is quite hard, full of obstacles. We could take another way, easier, more relaxing, however we don't know if we would achieve the goal taking this path...

When this situation comes to place, we need to understand a couple of things:

• Why have we set that goal?
• Is the goal worth the "sacrifice"?
• Am I trying to achieve a much bigger objective and this represents only one step to get to the big picture?
  

But... We can also start questioning the separation between Goal and Process and also the concept of sacrificing something for an achievement. Maybe we should set the goal of having a good process.

The doctor of happiness explains a lot more about what makes us happy (I found this on Jason's blog), and unless there is someone who does not want to be happy, our goals should consider this happy man's results.



Happy 2009 to everyone!!!