Pursuing the Wrong Goals

I was playing Candy Crush a few weeks ago, and I was getting frustrated because I could not beat the level.  It seemed impossible.  Until I realized after playing the same level for a couple days that I needed to combine striped candies, not sprinkled ones.  I was playing toward the wrong goal, duh!  Then I got to thinking how many times life is like that.  Sometimes things are just hard.  But sometimes we are spinning our wheels trying to get to a goal that we were never meant to reach.  We need to step back and check to see if the goal we're working so hard toward is even the right goal. 

I learned this when I was killing myself trying to get through premed, work full time, and travel back and forth to Akron frequently to be with my sick mom.  I realized that, while I definitely wanted to be in the health field and help people, I wasn't so sure being a doctor was worth 11 more years of this insanity, especially as I saw how little interaction the doctors in the hospital actually get with their patients.  So I stopped.  I quit spinning my wheels and gave myself a break to figure out what I really wanted to do and how to get there.  That resulted in my going to nursing school after having a kid, and in fact finishing nursing school with 3 kids, but it didn't really seem that hard, nothing compared to when I was working toward the wrong goal.

So the next time things seem too hard, step back and look at the big picture.  Are you working toward the wrong goal or are you just having to work extra hard to get to the right one?  There's nothing wrong with hard work, I'm a big fan, but working hard toward the wrong thing is wasted energy, and no one has time for that.