Setting Goals: Starting with the End in Mind

Recently, I feel like a broken record, as I’ve been repeatedly asking people two questions when talking through problems. Those two questions are:

Why are you doing this?
What is your goal?

The “Why” part of the equation is a personal question that each person has to answer for his- or herself, so let’s move on to goals. This year, instead of setting ‘resolutions’ for myself, I have set goals with the following metrics in mind: Goal Scale:

One Block Impact
One City Impact
One Country Impact
Global Impact

Goal category:

Fortune
Fame
Fun

I’d like to think that the goal scale categories are relatively intuitive; after all, if you know your target audience, it will help you to define your scale. However, working with goal categories can be a little trickier, so let’s ponder those for a while. While it isn’t impossible to create goals that incorporate all three of the major goal categories, goals that focus on incorporating two instead of three are often much more do-able. For instance, there are many CEO’s who run huge companies that they love, but who remain relatively unknown. These CEOs have accomplished the goals of fortune and fun, and are making lots of money while doing a job they enjoy. On the other hand, there are some people who instead prefer to pursue the goals of fame and fun. Take the guy who owned his own internet radio company, which he later sold to Nokia. He started his business because he loved doing his job, and became relatively famous while doing it. At the end of the day, though, he didn’t really amass a fortune, but a lot of people knew of him. I suppose it’s also possible to combine the goals of fame and fortune, but without some fun in there, I’m not sure why you’d want to keep pursuing that option. Of course, there are also those rare individuals who can accomplish all three of the major goal categories at once—say, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Just because it’s rare doesn’t mean it can’t happen. However, we’ll all be waiting a long time for the stars and planets to align if we think that everyone has that potential. Probably forever, in fact. So, once you’ve picked your two goal categories that you’d like to pursue, now it’s time to make your goals a little more tangible. Don’t start planning to earn your first $1 billion just yet, though. As Ross Slater from HighSpot says, huge goals create nausea; start with smaller goals which are do-able. Don’t necessarily make your goals too simple, but also don’t make them completely impossible. Easy goals don’t allow you to live up to your potential, and impossible goals are daunting and often don’t get started. Try to strike a balance for somewhere in the middle, where you will still be challenged but not completely overwhelmed. The point I’m driving at with this blog post is that if you know where you want to go before you start going, it will have a better outcome. Limiting your focus a bit towards achievable goals ensures that you won’t spend all your energy and efforts on processes that won’t help you to achieve them. If you achieve your goals, you can always make new ones and go for those; if you never meet your goals, you’re probably not focused enough on them or you picked ones that aren’t suitable for you, and you need to reexamine what you really want to be doing and why.