How To Set Goals That Work
August 11, 2007
Photo by Le Chef
Have you ever set goals but failed to achieve them because you forgot about them? Or maybe you tried very hard to achieve your goals in the initiate period, but your enthusiasms and efforts just died off after some time? If you are reading this, then chances are you had.
Maybe you have given up on setting goals, because it just didn’t work for you. Maybe you concluded that you are simply not the type of person who has the perseverance or discipline to follow through with goals. In fact, failing to follow through on goals makes you feel so guilt-ridden, that any further goal setting effort is just too much to bear.
To be very honest, I was once like that too; setting goals in my mind and failing to achieve them. I tend to get so excited about certain things and I set a goal for myself to achieve it. In the initial period, I’d even put in a lot of time and effort. However, over time, once the hustles and tussles of our daily life sets in, whatever goals I had in mind just flew with the wind.
It was very discouraging for me; I ended up feeling very guilty about failing on my promises to myself. I felt incapable and incompetent of achieving anything worthy.
Later, through my readings, I learned that the top achievers in life are very goal-oriented. These people not only set goals, they think about their goals a lot, with great clarity, and most importantly, they achieve their goals. After this, I was determined to learn how to set goals that work; it is one of the very important skills which determines our success in life.
The 7 Steps To Setting Goals That Work
There are seven steps to achieving your goals. With this seven steps, you will start to achieve small success in your life within days. As your confidence level grows and fuels your efforts, over time, you will observe that your small successes are accumulating into big successes; be it in areas of more income, healthy living, better work-life balance, better relationships, you will find yourself achieving what you truly desire to achieve.
Step 1 - Give Your Goals A Number
One of the biggest and common mistakes in setting goals is setting fuzzy goals; goals that are too generic, and which are not actionable. You have to be very specific and clear about what you want. If you want to be slimmer, set an exact weight, a number as target. If you want to be richer, how much money is richer? $100,000, $10 million? If you want to spend more quality time with your family? How much time is “more time”? 1 hours a week or 25 hours a month?
You get the drift, don’t you? In order to commit ourselves on a goal, it has to be specific. It has to be a measurable goal. In this way, it is 100% clear if you’ve achieve your goal or not. There is no ambiguity, no room for arguments, no room for excuses for yourself.
By giving yourself no room for excuses, you are more likely to commit yourself. Trust me, it works; because it’s in everyone of us, it’s a basic human quality. We want to be credible, we want to live up to our words. That is the same reason why we feel guilty about failing on our goals in the first place. Learn to harness this same human trait to your advantage, to a more productive way other than guilt.
Step 2 - Write Down Your Goals
Studies show that 90% of people who don’t achieve their goals, don’t write their goals down.
By writing down your goals, you’ll gain greater clarity on your thoughts and you are more likely to commit them to memory and sub-conscious. This is because the process of writing it down forces your mind to process your thoughts differently than just thinking about them alone.
Imagine an architect that tries to build a house without a blueprint. How does he know where the living room, the dining room, the bedrooms are going to be? How does he visualize and and see the relationships between the rooms, the floorings, the beams, the foundations and all the inter-relations between parts? Without a blueprint, the building is just a very fuzzy thought inside the architect’s mind. Anything idea or goal that is fuzzy is only sure to produce fuzzy results.
By codifying your goals in paper, putting them into words, you take the first step of manifesting your thoughts into something more tangible. You will gain greater clarity on what your goals are, and why you want them.
Try it: Take a pen and paper and try writing out your goals within 2 minutes. Write as many as they come to mind without giving it too much thoughts; Don’t worry about accuracy at this point, just write down whatever comes to mind. This is like your thoughts, but written on paper.
After you have written your goals in the first 2 minutes, review the goals that you have written down. Do they look like they fully express what you truly want? Are you satisfy with what you have written down? Chances are “NO”. You will want to edit them, improve them a little, to be more precise and accurate. You are likely to feel that the first draft of goals don’t truly reflect exactly what you want. You want more clarity.
See? The process of writing your goals down allows you to review and gain greater clarity on what you truly want. It’s amazing how our mind works!
Step 3 - Give Your Goals Datelines
Next, give your goals dates by which you are suppose to achieve the goal.
The reason is similar to Step 1. It is to have great clarity on your goals. With a specific date, you have clear directions when this is suppose to happen. There is no assumptions or ambiguity.
Let’s say you want to double your income. You don’t want to double your income at some time in the future; there’s no use in doubling your income in 20 years. You want it by a specific time to be meaningful. So you want to double your income by 31st Dec 2007.
One golden rule:
For now, don’t worry about HOW you are to achieve this goal within the set time frame. Just put down a date by which you WANT to achieve the goal.
By doing steps 1 to 3 alone, you will have already progressed a great step forward; you will already have achieved so great a clarity in what you want out of your life that it is life changing. You will have already made some very basic, yet important questions about what you truly want, what you don’t want, and why. These realizations will stay with you for life from this point on. They will grow over time, they will expand in clarity, and they will guide you in your everyday decisions.
In step 4 - 7, we are going to talk about the how to execute and turn goals into realities, in a very simple yet effective way. So stay with me.
Next, write down a list of all the things that you can do to make the goal come true.
At this point, you may not have the knowledge, capability to achieve your goals. So think about who are the people you can talk to, the books that you can read, the things that you can do; and add them to the list that you are making.
This is a living list which will grow as your understanding and knowledge grows. As you discover more things, through asking, reading and experiencing; add to the list, and you are one step closer to your goal.
Remember that when you first set your goals, you didn’t know HOW you are going to achieve them? Maybe it seemed like an impossible goal to achieve. However, as your knowledge and understanding grows, you break down your goals into a list of actionable items which will take you step-by-step nearer to achieving your goals.
This is a proven way of thinking which leads to success: to have the success or end-state in mind, before worrying about how to get there. Think about great achievements in history; for example, before the aeroplane was invented, human flight was deemed as impossible. If Wright Brothers didn’t have this successful way of thinking, we will not be having any aeroplanes today.
What they did was to have the goal first: they wanted to fly! Then they started to break “mission impossible” into a list of actionable items, including research, building prototypes, and experiments. From their experiments, they made new discoveries and added more action items to their list. Each time an action item is crossed off from their list, they are one step closer to achieving their goal.
And you can do this too. If your goal is to have a $10 million revenue business in 2 years. Build a list and start from there! Once you try to build that list, you will see that your goal is very actionable and very possible. Work on the first few items, like talking to successful business people, reading about successful business models, and writing down your business plan etc. As your insight grows, so does your list.
Step 5 - Sequence And Prioritize Your List
You now have a list. So which item should you do first, and which later?
You need to prioritize your list, base on your current access to people, knowledge, capabilities, situation; and also based on which item can get you the greatest results or discoveries.
Once you have the done this, you basically have created a plan for yourself. This is the plan, the HOW-TO, that will bring you from your current state, to the state that you desire in your goal.
Step 6 - Take Immediate Action
So now you have goals and a plan to achieve your goals. The next step is to act on it immediately.
Get this into your head:
No matter how grand your goals are, and no matter how elaborate or thorough your plan is, you will achieve NOTHING until you take actions!
It is a simple concept, result comes from actions.
Achievers are people who can kick themselves into actions despite fear, doubt, lack of resources or knowledge. Mediocrity comes from too much hesitation and what-ifs, and allowing circumstance to stop them from getting into action. So act; do not be afraid of making mistakes along the way, because you definitely will. Treat these a feedbacks, as lesson learned. Refine your plan, add to your list as you go along.
Take the smallest, easiest item from your list and start acting on it. Something that you can immediately complete within the next 1 to 2 days.
It is proven that the longer you wait between having a plan and taking action, the lesser your chance of achieving your goals.
So schedule small and quick action items first in your plan and act. These small success will break your inertia, and set the momentum for bigger things to come.
When I set the goal to start a successful blog with high traffic for passive income generation, I didn’t know what to write about, what kind of value I should bring my readers, or if it will be successful at all. During that period, I was about to have my wedding and honeymoon in the following 3 to 4 weeks. I knew that waiting this length of time is going to greatly minimize my chance of achieving this goal, and I needed to take immediate actions. So I immediately applied for hosting with a web hosting company and committed to a hosting plan for the next 12 months. I am still pursuing this goal today, because I had taken immediate action and already committed myself on the course towards it, and I am learning day by day, through small actions on how to make this goal a success.
The point here is that you can do it too. Act today, act now. Learn from Nike,
Just do it!
Step 7 - Do Something Everyday On Your Goals
Now that you have started on your journey towards your goals. The challenge is to stick to it. If you have followed me from steps 1 to 6 till this far, congratulations! You are already half way to achieving your goals. You will already have goals that are so great in clarity that it truly reflects what you desire. You will also have a plan, a list that shows you how very possible your goals are. Lastly, you will also have already taken immediate first steps in your list towards achieving your goals.
The best way to achieve your goals is to do something everyday on your goals. In this way, there is no way for you to forget or miss your goals.
From your plan, schedule the small, actionable items from your plans into your weekly routine. Put it into your scheduler or your MS OutLook calendar, somewhere where you get to see them everyday. Schedule them as small tasks which you can complete within a day. If your task cannot be completed within this short duration, it is too big, and you need to break it down further.
The principle here is the same,
Have small successes that will accumulate into big successes over time.
Face it, it is just too tough to sustain consistent efforts, simply base on a grand and big goal that is so far away. By breaking it down, and scheduling it into your everyday life, you get immediate feedbacks and can track your progress. Your small successes will also motivate you to stay on course.
At the same time, schedule monthly or bi-monthly reviews of your actions over the past few weeks. What have you completed or discovered so far? Have you missed any critical action items? Is there a need to review your plan due to new discoveries or information?
By doing this, you create a feedback loop from your daily lives back into your grand goals for refinement. This process also allows you to constantly toggle between the strategic view of your goals and tactical view of daily action items, and create a strong connection between them.
I like to share this story about how pilots fly their planes as a good analogy. Before takeoff, pilots program the destination into the plane, and then they takeoff and commence flying towards the destination. However, do you know that due to air currents, updrafts, downdraft, the plane will fly off course. In fact, 99% of the time, the plane is not flying straight towards the destination! Yet, we always land correctly at the destination (and on time), because the navigation system on the plane provides feedback to the pilot, and allows him/her to adjust the course towards where we want to go!
It’s the same with our journey towards achieving our goals. You start off with a very clear goal in mind; you constantly drift off along the way, but because you gather information and feedbacks, you are able to keep adjusting yourself and re-aligning yourself back to your goals. Repeat this every so often until you finally achieve your goals.
There is no straight road to success. It is always meandering!
For more details on scheduling goals into daily schedule, you may want to check out my other article on “How To Juggle Between Multiple Roles And Still Have A Life“.
Conclusion
So my friend, these are the 7 steps that we have covered:
- Give Your Goals A Number
- Write Down Your Goals
- Give Your Goals Datelines
- Make A List
- Sequence And Prioritize Your List
- Take Immediate Action
- Do Something Everyday On Your Goals
Equipped with this new knowledge, I’m sure you’re on your way to achieving your goals and your dreams. Remember that top achievers are goal-oriented people, and I know for sure you are one of them (else you wouldn’t have followed me till this far), and that your success is definitely possible, as long as you are equipped with the right mindset, strategies and knowledge.
For those who may still be skeptical, I challenge you to try out steps 1 to 3. It’s a mere 10 minutes exercise at most. See for yourself the difference it makes in your thinking and thought process, and decide for yourself if you want to proceed further.
It is alright to make mistakes and failure along the way. It is alright if you are not sticking 100% to your plan sometimes. It is also alright if you feel that you need to change your goals along the way. Remember that the feedbacks are meant for you to adjust your course. If the feedback tells you that you are heading to the wrong destination, you should have the courage and conviction to move on to another destination that you truly want.
Have a great journey ahead!
[…] I wrote about 7 steps to set goals effectively. Today, I like to expand on that a […]
I would add that one needs to give their goals to a friend or mentor. When you keep your goals to yourself, its a lot easier to cast them aside.
Hi Cameron,
That’s a great addition to this list, and I agree with you. Adding a friend or mentor to the picture and to hold ourselves accountable for our goals, we will have a better motivation to succeed. Thanks for sharing.
[…] often talk about setting goals and living your passion. I have to admit that this is not an easy thing to do. More often than not, […]
Paul
your ideas make me want to start rigth now
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