Goals define means or means define goals?

Lately I’ve been put up to face different ways of setting up objectives, goals, strategies and tactics. About how important it is to have SMART or SMARTER objective, about how important it is to have a final goal for your life, about how important it is to know who you really are when defining those goals.
True. What I’ve observed though is that people often tend to define their goals by the means they have…which is a misleading process of establishing goals. That way, at the end of the road all you get are adjustments made along the way, adjustments made to get the impression that we are truly working on obtaining our goal, but “the environment” never lets us.
I think it’s a mistake. I believe that there is destiny (seen as a group of factors, causes and effects that affect us and the rest of us) and that there are our decisions, made to affect primarily us and to decide a course of action primarily for us. And from that point of view, establishing the goal is only our decision. After that, there are objectives on short and long term, strategies and tactics which can all be comprised as means. And these are, in a certain manner, influenced by the environment, but as long as the goal is still out there, in front of us, creative people can overcome barriers and find some other means of going to the arrival point.
On the other hand, going along the way, hoping to achieve a goal of whatever importance it might have, will only let the rest of the people and happenings decide our goal. It’s true that sometimes we have to take setbacks and watch our actions somehow undermined, but as long as we know where we are heading, a setback might be looked as a refreshment. On the opposite corner there is going from setback to setback, at the comfortable shadow of: “i knew that I had no means to obtain my goal, so I didn’t bother setting and detailing it.”
I promise I will come back and write about destiny, since I know that there are people wondering about my sentence from above.
In the meantime…I already have my goals established. Yey for me :)