You may have heard of Maslow's pyramid of needs. This one is much the same, only for goals. I should add that we'll go into this in detail in the practical material; for now I'll just give a brief intro: what it is and why it's needed.
The pyramid of goals might look much like the image above. You have some global life goal, or rather a direction. Then come goals for the next 5 or even 10 years that are directly tied to this life direction. Next you have a clear plan for the year, broken down into quarters, months, weeks and days. By and large, my second book is exactly about how to implement goal-setting and breaking down goals better and more correctly. There's no point starting with distant 5–10 year goals, let alone for a whole lifetime, since they may change several times yet. But building clear goals for the year ahead is quite possible and necessary.
If you have a life goal and roughly know what you want to do to achieve it over 5–10 years, that's great. If not, there's nothing critical about that. Generally speaking, age is no barrier to forming global life goals. People often only work out what they like most and what they want by 30–40. So it's never too late to think about it. Even I still have a fairly abstract life goal (or rather more than one), but I hope that over the years it will become clearer in my mind. That's exactly why I recommend thinking about long-term goals as well as local and short-term ones.
