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Your Best Year Ever — Chapter-07: Great Goals Check Seven Boxes
- Source: /library/Your Best Year Ever/source-file.pdf
- PDF pages: 83–102
- Pages without text: 87, 93, 102
- Note: Includes the Step introduction page that precedes the chapter.
DESIGN YOUR FUTURE I find it fascinating that on three separate occasions in the Gospels Jesus approaches someone who obviously needs restoration or healing and asks, “What do you want me to do?” What makes this so interesting? From a Christian perspective Jesus not only knew what these people needed, he could instantly heal them. But he didn’t. Instead, he asked them to declare what they wanted. It seems their apparent need was not their greatest need. More than healing, they needed clarity. And Jesus was unwilling to meet their physical needs until they got clear on what they wanted. Instead, he first prompted them to verbalize their desire. Great results don’t just happen. You don’t usually drift to a destination you would have chosen. Instead, you have to be intentional, force yourself to get clear on what you want and why it’s important, and then pursue a plan of action that accomplishes your objective. Step 3 is designed to help you find the clarity you need so you can create the life you want. And this, my friends, is where it gets fun.
7 Great Goals Check Seven Boxes Do not think or do anything without having some aim in sight; the person who journeys aimlessly will have labored in vain. MARK THE MONK, On the Spiritual Law In 2002, General Motors determined to boost its share of the US automobile market to 29 percent, a position the company hadn’t held since 1999. The company was obsessed with the number. It offered crazy purchase incentives, such as zero-interest loans, to drive sales. Executives even started wearing lapel pins with the number 29 to keep the goal front and center. But they missed it. Why? GM blamed the competition, especially from South Korea. “If the competition would just play a little fairer, we could do it,” one executive complained. But analysts said GM became so focused on the goal, the company undercut its own business to attain it. Because of reckless decisions made in pursuit of their goal, the company ended up bankrupt several years later and dependent on federal bailout dollars just to survive.1 And it’s not just GM. Other organizations have fallen into similar traps. Remember Enron? Looking at these and other stories, it would be easy to conclude that goal setting is somehow counterproductive, perhaps disastrously so.2 But that’s not my take. I’ve been practicing and teaching goal setting far too long for that. I’ve also seen and experienced far too many successes. Not only can the pitfalls be easily overcome, but we can actually engineer our goals from the outset to avoid them entirely. We can transform our resolutions, aspirations, and dreams into powerful, compelling, written goals that check seven key
boxes. But before I unpack this framework, I want to address why we should bother writing our goals. Since written goals are the foundation on which you build your best year ever, it deserves some explanation. The Importance of Written Goals There’s a commonly cited Ivy League study that supposedly shows writing down goals helps us achieve them. The problem is it’s phony. And when people discover this, they sometimes think the benefits of writing down our goals are fake too.3 But no. Professor Gail Matthews of Dominican University of California conducted her own study not long ago and confirmed the power of writing down our goals. She recruited 267 entrepreneurs, executives, artists, healthcare professionals, educators, attorneys, and other professionals from several different countries. She divided them into five groups and tracked them over several weeks. Matthews discovered, among other things, the mere act of writing one’s goals boosted achievement by 42 percent.4 This gels with my own experience and that of people I coach. Committing your goals to writing is not the end game. But it is foundational for success for at least five reasons. First, it forces you to clarify what you want. Imagine setting out on a trip with no particular destination in mind. How do you pack? What roads do you take? How do you know when you have arrived? Instead, you start by picking a destination. Clarity is a precondition for writing. (Ask any author suffering writer’s block; they can’t write because they’re unsure what they’re trying to say.) Second, writing down goals helps you overcome resistance. When we go to the trouble of formulating and recording our goals, we’re doing more than dreaming. We’re also engaging our intellect. We’re processing, self- checking, and analyzing. Every meaningful intention, dream, or goal encounters resistance. From the moment you set a goal, you will begin to feel it. But this emotional and intellectual engagement helps us identify deeply with our goals and forge resolve around our desires. I’ll focus on this later in Step 4. Third, it motivates you to take action. Writing your goals down is only the beginning. Articulating your intention is important, but it is not enough.
You must execute your goals. You have to take action. I have found that writing down my goals and reviewing them regularly provokes me to take the next most important action.
Fourth, it filters other opportunities. The more successful you become, the more you will be deluged with opportunities. In fact, these new opportunities can quickly become distractions that pull you off course. The only antidote I know of is to maintain a list of written goals by which to evaluate these new opportunities. Establishing your priorities up front equips you to intentionally avoid what some call “shiny object syndrome.” Fifth, it enables you to see—and celebrate—your progress. It is particularly difficult when you aren’t seeing progress. You feel like you are working yourself to death, going nowhere. But written goals can serve like mile markers on a highway. They enable you to see how far you have come and how far you need to go. They also provide an opportunity for celebration when you attain them. I’ll cover reasons 3–5 later in Step 5. But to get the most from your written goals, as I said before, you need to formulate them to check certain boxes. And that’s where my seven-part framework comes in. You’ve probably heard of SMART goals. They have five different attributes, one for each letter of the SMART acronym (Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Time-bound). My coauthor Daniel Harkavy and I used this in our book Living Forward. General Electric pioneered this approach in the early 1980s. Others have modified and expanded it over the years, including me. The changes I’ve made to the system are based on insights from the best goal-achievement research available and are designed to drive results. Let’s dive into the seven attributes of my SMARTER system now. Attribute 1: Specific The first attribute of SMARTER goals is that they’re specific. Focus is power. You can drive the same amount of water through two pipes and create greater force in one of them just by reducing its diameter. That’s similar to what happens when we narrow our goals. What the studies show is that the tougher and more specific the goal, the more likely we are to engage our focus, creativity, intellect, and persistence. Vague goals don’t really inspire us. And it’s hard to know where to put what little effort and creativity we are willing to invest. Specific goals create a channel for our problem-solving skills, effort, and more.5
To formulate a SMARTER goal, you’ve got to identify exactly what you want to accomplish. For example, I could say “Write a book,” but that’s too vague. What’s the specific book that you want to write? In my case I would do better to write something like “Finish writing Free to Focus,” the title of my online productivity course and the working title of a book I’m writing. Here’s another example: “Learn photography.” Is that specific? No. What aspect of photography do you want to learn? A better goal would be “Complete Lynda.com’s Photography 101 course.” That’s specific.
We can make our goals more attainable by ensuring they check the right boxes. Write goals that are specific, measurable, actionable,
risky, time-keyed, exciting, and relevant. Attribute 2: Measurable The second attribute of SMARTER goals is that they are measurable. In other words, they have built-in criteria you can measure yourself against. This is important for two reasons. The first is the most obvious. How do you know that you’ve reached the goal? It’s not very helpful or inspiring to say that you want to make more money this year than last. How much more? There’s a big difference between a small cost of living raise and driving your commissions up 30 percent. Same with getting fit. Saying you want to exercise more often doesn’t do much. It’s not objective. Saying you plan to go to the gym four days a week is different. When the goal is measurable, we know the criteria for success. The second reason is that you need to be able to measure yourself against the goal. An objective target allows you to set markers and milestones along the way. That means you can chart your progress, and half the fun of goals is in the progress we make. In fact, “We experience the strongest positive emotional response when we make progress on our most difficult goals,” according to psychology professor Timothy A. Pychyl.6 Or as economist Richard Layard says, “Prod any happy person, and you will find a project.”7 Attribute 3: Actionable The third attribute of SMARTER goals is that they’re actionable. Goals are fundamentally about what you’re going to do. As a result, it’s essential to get clear on the primary action when formulating your goals. How? It may sound simplistic, but I find it’s best to use a strong verb to prompt the action you want to take. You don’t want something like am, or be, or have. You want a verb like run, finish, or eliminate. A couple of examples: “Be more consistent in blogging.” Is that actionable? No. That’s a state-of- being verb. But something like “Write two blog posts a week,” that’s actionable. It starts with the verb write, and it’s clear and directive about the action. Here’s another example: “Be more health conscious.” Is that
actionable? Not really. Instead you could say something like “Walk for thirty minutes five times a week.” Much improved.
Attribute 4: Risky The fourth attribute of SMARTER goals is that they’re a bit risky. Hear me out. Normally we talk about setting goals that are realistic. That’s usually what the R in SMART refers to. But if we start by asking what’s realistic, we’re likely to set the bar too low. I introduced 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever alum J.R. earlier. When he started the process, he was making a six-figure income, but he was unfulfilled at work. He felt unrecognized for his contribution and no longer connected to the mission of the organization. He knew he needed a change. One response would have been to set a safe goal—say, addressing his problems with his employer. But J.R. didn’t do that. “I said enough’s enough,” he remembered. “I literally went back to my employer at the time and I said, ‘You know what? Take me off full-time salary.’” After that, he set a goal to start his own firm. J.R. had a wife and two kids under five, but he was confident he could make a go of his own business. And he did. He even paid off $30,000 of debt he accrued when he quit his job. The risk drove the results. Had J.R. gone the safe route, he would likely have accomplished far less. Why? “There is a linear relationship between the degree of goal difficulty and performance,” as goal theorists Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham say. Looking at the results of almost 400 studies, they concluded, “The performance of participants with the highest goals was over 250% higher than those with the easiest goals.”8 We rise to a challenge, but we lay back when it’s easy. Still, safe goals are a constant temptation for us. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has done pioneering research on risk aversion. “We are driven more strongly to avoid losses than achieve gains,” he says. “The aversion to failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to achieve it.”9 For some that bias is stronger than others, and it has tremendous upsides—for instance, keeping us out of trouble. But it can disserve us when we set goals, especially if we’re unaware of its effect on us. Because failing feels like losing, we’re tempted to set small goals we can easily reach in the name of being “realistic.” We’re also likely to slack off once we’ve reached those small goals.
I’m not saying everyone should quit their job or burn the ships. But by focusing on what’s supposedly realistic, we can inadvertently trigger our natural impulse to avoid loss and end up accomplishing less than we otherwise might have. I’m not saying we should set goals that are crazy. I am saying we should set goals that stretch and challenge us. I’ll have more to say on this later in chapter 9. Attribute 5: Time-keyed The fifth attribute of SMARTER goals is that they’re time-keyed. This could be a deadline, frequency, or a time trigger. For example, if I just had the goal “Read more,” it’s missing a sense of urgency. It could happen over the next ten years. It could happen over the next twenty years. Even if I assume it’s a New Year’s resolution so it means sometime this year, it’s still just out there somewhere. I can put it off and stop thinking about it. But when I say I want to read two books each month, I’ve not only created a challenge but also focus. Deadlines demand attention and spur action. I’d better get in motion because the clock is ticking. Here’s another example: “Acquire five new design clients.” By when? “Acquire five new design clients by December 31.” That’s better. But here’s a warning: As you’re thinking about assigning deadlines, don’t make them all December 31. Distant deadlines discourage action. You’ll think, “I have so much time. It’s not due for another ten or twelve months.” Effort dissipates to fill time. But the reverse is also true. Short time horizons concentrate our effort. The tighter the deadline, the more productive you can be. A study by Locke and Latham found that workers in one field experiment were able to keep production at 100 percent even when their time was cut by 40 percent.10 The new deadline created huge gains in productivity—and we can experience the same sort of gains in our personal and private lives when we set near- term goals, leaving more margin for other pursuits. The main thing to watch is your bandwidth. I recommend setting seven to ten goals per year—but only two or three major deadlines per quarter. Any more than that and your focus will suffer along with your results. Deadlines are essential for achievement goals. But what about habit goals? I’ll explain more about the differences between these two kinds of
goals in the next chapter, but for now we can focus on different kinds of time keys. Deadlines don’t make sense with ongoing activities. But deadlines aren’t the only way to key activity to time. If we use frequency statements and time triggers we can actually spur the habits we want to cultivate. Saying “Exercise more this year” is a recipe for inaction. But saying “Run for thirty minutes at the park every weekday morning at 7 a.m.” sets you up to win. Not only does it say what kind of exercise and where you’re going to do it, not only does it say for how long, it also tells us exactly when you’re going to do it. Time keys for habit goals create external cues that trigger action. And they work. After telling study participants about the dangers of heart disease, researchers in the UK recommended exercise as a way to prevent it. On their own, participants intended to work out but usually forgot. They had a less than 40 percent success rate. I get it. Life’s busy. But some were asked to bake a time trigger into their goal. Their success rate was better than 90 percent.11 The time key helped drive the behavior they wanted to see. I’ll show you how you can leverage Activation Triggers like these in Step 5. Attribute 6: Exciting The sixth attribute of SMARTER goals is that they’re exciting. They inspire you, in other words. Researchers say that we stand a better chance of reaching our goals if we are internally motivated to do so. External motivations might work for a while, but if we’re not getting something intrinsic from the goal, we’ll lose interest. That was a challenge James experienced with his prior job. Others set the goals he pursued. “That was a big problem for me,” he said. “I was so caught up with everyone else designing goals for me. I never took the time to design them for myself.” It was a game changer for him when he finally determined to take his destiny into his own hands. “The biggest difference for me is they no longer were overwhelming goals. They were inspiring goals. When I’m inspired, I want to go.” The change came down to one thing: he personally set goals that excited him. Another 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever student struggled with a goal she set of getting her accounting caught up in her small business. Important?
Yes. Inspiring? Not for her. As a result she struggled to maintain momentum. We all do. Ayelet Fishbach and Kaitlin Woolley of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business researched New Year’s resolutions. They first asked people to rate how much they enjoyed the resolutions they had set and then followed up a couple months later. Enjoyment turned out to be a key predictor of success. But as Alice G. Walton reported in the Chicago Booth Review, “That’s not how people typically choose their goals—they choose ones they feel are important. Fishbach says it’s fine to go ahead and set goals that feel important, but don’t compromise on pleasure entirely. ‘Don’t choose a New Year’s resolution you don’t enjoy doing.’ You’ll be setting yourself up for failure.” Instead, she says, “Tap into your intrinsic motivation.”12 Go with what excites you. If you don’t find your goals personally compelling, you won’t have the motivation to push through when things get tough or tedious. This is where you’ve got to be honest with yourself. Ask, “Does this goal inspire me?” Or, “Does it engage my heart? Am I willing to work hard to make it happen?” You might even ask if you find it fun; I usually do for at least some of my goals each year. All of these questions get at something we’ll cover in the next step—finding your why. Remember, we’re setting risky goals. We’re going to be tempted to quit at some point. Only an exciting goal can access the internal motivation you need to stay the course and achieve your goal. Attribute 7: Relevant That brings us to the seventh and final attribute of SMARTER goals. Effective goals are relevant to your life. This is about alignment, and it comes at the end of the list because it’s a good way to gut-check your goals before committing to them. Frankly, this is the main area where GM went wrong. But we can all stumble on this point if we’re not careful. If we’re going to succeed, we need goals that align with the legitimate demands and needs of our lives. Are you a working parent with young kids? Your goals will look much different than an empty nester or an undergrad. Depending on your circumstances, going to med school might not be in the cards right now. Pursuing a new weekend-gobbling hobby might put
unwanted strain on your family. You need to set goals that are relevant to your actual circumstances and true interests. You also need goals that align with your values. This should be obvious, but sometimes we feel outside pressure to set goals that go against the core of who we are. The pressure could be social, professional, whatever. But you need to resist the temptation to gear your performance for others— especially if it somehow goes against your values. Finally, you need goals that align amongst themselves. They must have harmony together as a whole. Setting multiple conflicting goals will only create friction and frustration. If we’re working against ourselves, we’ll experience more heartburn than progress. That goes for setting too many goals in general. When a goal is relevant to our season of life, personal values, and our other goals, we improve our odds for success. At the start of his memoir The To-Do List, journalist Mike Gayle has a moment of reflection. It’s his thirty-sixth birthday, and he’s plagued by all the things he has yet to accomplish with his life. So he sets some goals— 1,277 to be exact. Out of that list he achieved 1,269, but the comedy of the story is the craziness his wife must endure in the process.13 As far as I’m concerned, reading a farce is far better than living one. Instead, limit
yourself to seven to ten goals that align with your life, your values, and your ambitions. Goals of Your Own To summarize, SMARTER goals are specific, measurable, actionable, risky, time-keyed, exciting, and relevant. And now you’re ready to start designing some of your own. How do you get started? I recommend you begin by pulling up your LifeScore Assessment results. If you haven’t taken the assessment yet, take a moment to do so. You can find it at BestYearEver.me/lifescore. It only requires about ten minutes. Your LifeScore will help you craft a set of goals that are aligned with your personal growth path. Avoid setting more than seven to ten goals. Any more and you’ll dilute your efforts and suffer distraction. Any less and you might not stretch yourself enough. I also recommend setting a few per quarter so you can space your effort more or less evenly throughout the year. As I’ve mentioned before, you’ll want to include goals from several different LifeScore domains. I find that people are accustomed to setting career-related goals, but they rarely set goals in other areas of their life. As a result, those other domains suffer, sometimes catastrophically. To jump-start your thinking, I’ve provided three examples below from each of the ten principal life domains: SPIRITUAL INTELLECTUAL Set aside 15 minutes in the morning, 6 days a week, for reading and prayer starting January 1. Meditate for 30 minutes each day, 4 days a week beginning February 1. Journal at least 5 minutes at the end of each day. Read 2 books per month, starting in January. Select 2 conferences to attend and register by February 15. Buy foreign language program and learn Spanish by November 1.
EMOTIONAL PHYSICAL Get back to gardening this spring— tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, and herbs in the ground by April 15. Research and find a therapist/counselor, and start regular monthly sessions by March 1. Organize and redecorate my office by February 15. Replace fast-food lunch with healthy meals from home each weekday. Run 30 minutes each day, 4 days a week at 6:30 a.m. Choose a regular bedtime and get 8 hours of sleep per night for the next 90 days beginning January 1. MARITAL PARENTAL Create a date-night profile on Netflix and identify 20 movies for a weekly date beginning in May. Plan 2 regular dates each month and get them on the calendar by January 15. Pick 3 errands or tasks my spouse regularly does but doesn’t enjoy. Do one each week for him/her beginning April 1. Leave the office by 5:00 p.m. to have enough time for dinner and games with the kids starting in January. Have the kids brainstorm 25 meals. Cook at least 1 each weekend beginning in February. Set aside 7 vacation days to spend with family at their favorite location. Schedule by March 15. SOCIAL VOCATIONAL Join an athletic club/training group to meet new people by February 1. Volunteer with Habitat for Humanity on a local build by July 1. Take a painting/wine-tasting class to meet new people by August 1. Launch new product by March 30. Add 5,000 email subscribers to database by June 15. Quit job and launch new business by October 1.
AVOCATIONAL FINANCIAL Volunteer for the City Mission beginning in March. Visit 2 new restaurants each month. Make a list by January 30. Research 12 of the best action movies/comedies ever filmed and watch 1 each month beginning in January. Pay off remainder of car loan in the amount of $8,000 by August 25. Reduce eating out to 1 meal each week beginning January 1. Pay down $5,000 in credit card debt by May 1. You’ll notice that some of these goals are achievements and some are habits. In the next chapter, I’ll point out how to leverage the differences between the two. To help you with your own, I’ve also included here a series of fill-in-the- blank goal-setting templates: three for achievement goals and one for habit goals. These templates will ensure you check all seven boxes of the SMARTER system. You can also get additional inspiration by reviewing the sample goal templates at the back of the book. I designed these templates for my Full Focus Planner to help integrate several key aspects of goal achievement so you can experience your best year ever.