Achieving Goals
Achieving goals fulfills a need to learn, develop and demonstrate competency in life.
The application of our knowledge enables us to demonstrate our abilities, skills and competencies, which implicitly and explicitly drives our efforts to continuously improve, and thus, setting and reaching towards further goals.
This results in us actively striving to be good at certain tasks and activities, which in itself is beneficial for sustaining our interest, motivating us to higher levels and providing personal satisfaction.
Achieving goals fulfills our need for self-esteem by making us feel good about ourselves and boosting our confidence about our abilities to succeed and take on harder tasks and challenges. When we apply our skills to challenges we can become focused and free from distraction, which is when we ultimately feel the most effective, in control and able to achieve what psychologists regard as a state of flow. Developing mastery of skills contributes to psychological growth and is connected with the value of growing myself.
The cognitive abilities we develop transition through a series of defined milestones that generally peak around early adulthood.
After the structure of school based learning, the need for learning and developing transforms into our own personal or societal aims and ambitions, which may be based on a number of socially defined milestones or achievements (e.g. passing exams, getting a job, buying a house) or personally defined goals, which vary significantly from person to person (e.g. saving money, winning a gold medal, building expertise in a specific field of study).
Want to know more?
Read all the details, including how this value presents itself through who we are, what we have, do and need, in our Human Values Research Paper