Shifting Goals
27 Aug 2017
What is a goal? Why should we goal set? What is my current trajectory?
In high school I had no goals. Well, that is not entirely true. I did have some goals but they were lofty and full of fluff. There was nothing that I was doing at the time that could back my progression towards accomplishing those goals.
I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy at that time. Sure I was participating in Civil Air Patrol, which was a leadership development program similar to JROTC, but I became lazy and felt entitled to get my acceptance letter at the of the year.
Of course I failed. I got a rejection letter. The only other college I had applied to was the University of Hawaii. This was when everyone that I knew, well almost everyone, thought that UH was not a great university. Granted my views have changed since then, but I felt like life shifted pretty dramatically for me. No longer did I feel entitled to anything since when I felt like it counted the most I failed.
I attribute this failure to both entitlement and my inability to make proper goals, but this essay is about goal setting. When I entered college at UH, I told myself that I wouldn’t let myself or my parents down again. So I set off to make smaller goals and keep shifting upwards.
My first goal I made was to get a job as an EE at Pearl Harbor. My dad heard that Pearl Harbor was a good place to work and was a stable job. It was my first step towards making smaller but smarter goals.
The first time I shifted goals was when I went the career fair. I saw the Boeing table, heard about the better salary and position and decided to pursue a job at Boeing. The guy at the table told me that I should start finding a project so I could add some things to my resume. I didn’t even have a professional resume at the time.
From that point I worked in projects that would showcase my ability. I worked hard in the Liquid Metal lab and the UH Drone Team. I got a freshman internship in Japan. I worked hard and finally it paid off after I got a summer internship at Northrop Grumman.
My goals had shifted from Pearl Harbor to Boeing to Northrop Grumman, but I had already hit my goal in Sophomore year. So it was time to shift my goal again. I then shifted my goals to a software engineering internship.
I started studying. There’s a website called LeetCode that I used to study up. Now today I successfully finished an internship at a tech company. Constantly shifting my goals upward has geared me towards success. Have I feel like I reached the end goal? Not even close. However, by shifting goals I have gotten much farther than I thought I ever would.