What’s a Life Goal – 1

Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center

https://youtu.be/A7VxrTuHrpg Auto-generated transcript: The question that I'm asked from time to time by thinking individuals, thinking young people is, how should I focus on a goal? How do I arrive at a goal for myself in life? Now those who are born with that thought and that knowledge and that focus clearly in their minds are blessed. But those who are not born with that are in a way blessed even more. Because when you get something easy, sometimes you tend to lose value for it. You think it's okay, it comes easy to me, so it must be easy. Whereas the reality of life is that it's not easy. And for those to whom it does not come easy, I'm saying they are even more fortunate, they're more lucky because on the one hand they will get that knowledge when they work hard enough for it. And meanwhile, they will have the opportunity to develop resilience, to develop perseverance, and to develop consistency, and to develop persistence, and to develop commitment, and to develop discipline. All of which are critically important to achieve that goal no matter how easily or no matter with what difficulty you arrived at it in the first place. Because even the person who knows from the moment you open his eyes that I want to be this, whatever that this is, he will need persistence and he will need a sting power, he will need the commitment and he will need all of that if he really wants to achieve the goal. Getting that you want something is one thing, getting it is a whole different ball game. The benefit or rather the only benefit of knowing clearly what you want is that you can start working in that direction sooner than somebody who has to go through a lot of soul searching and so forth before he or she gets to that clarity. That's about the only benefit. But if you know it clearly, but you do not do anything to develop, to bring discipline into your life, to be persistent, to be consistent, to have determination, then good luck to you because you are not going to achieve that goal. Now therefore how to do this? So I'm not talking about the one to whom this is clear, I'm talking about the one to whom it may not be so clear and they are struggling. The first thing to do is to make friends with yourself. I've said this many times and I believe this and I believe it very strongly that one of the greatest things that we have lost, which used to be a strength, maybe for some people it was a strength by default. I mean, you know, they didn't ask for it, but it was there. It became part of their life. It's like people living on steep hillsides, they get to do a lot of cardiac work, walking because they're interested in cardiac fitness, but because that's how you get around. You live on top of the hillside, you would go down to the river for water, carry the water back up again and so on and so on. So you are getting, you're doing some work for some other reason, but you're getting cardiac fitness as a bonus and I think that is something which is, you know, worth thinking about. The thing to do, what we have lost is this, which is the ability to be comfortable with yourself. The comfort with silence, the comfort with solitude, comfort with being by yourself. And when I say by yourself, I don't just mean by yourself physically, personally as in one human being, but one human being minus their phone, because the phone is the biggest distraction and the biggest interference that we have bought and brought into our lives. And we have created this completely toxic lifestyle, which is based on where the most common feeling is that of fear, FOMO, fear of missing out. And if you just think about all the time we check the phone so that we don't suffer from FOMO, so that we don't miss out something and see, okay, so I check my phone, you know, 10,000 times a day because that's the truth of it. That's how much we check every three seconds and say, okay, sure, so I did that. Now what did I get? Well, obviously I didn't miss out.