Set Your Sights

Yesterday, I helped a student with a paper that explored how and why people sometimes sabotage their own goals. The student's bottom line, which I thought summed up the problem quite nicely, was that people sabotage their goals by losing sight of them because they put too much focus on other things.

Many of the things that take our focus away from our main goals and desires are other desires and goals. For example, if you're main goal is to reach the top of a mountain, your progress toward that goal will be greatly hindered if you run around, trying to catch butterflies along the way. If you want to reach your destination, you have to keep progressing toward it.

Naturally, the same is true of reaching our eternal destination. If we seek the Celestial Kingdom, we can't afford to follow too many fleeting distractions along the way. It's true that we have an eternity of travel time, so if we're making any progress at all, we will eventually make it there, but we have to make sure we're actually making progress, not just wandering around or away.

In order to accomplish anything, we need to keep our sights set on that goal long enough to accomplish it. If we have a long-term goal in mind, we can't afford to let our other goals and desires distract us from our main goal. We can have other goals we accomplish along the way, but we can't afford to let our other goals and desires pull us away from our ultimate goal and greatest desire. To reach the Celestial Kingdom, we need to keep our sights set on eternity and not let ourselves put too much focus on goals and desires that might pull us away from reaching our main goal.