What was the last goal that you failed to achieve?
Are there proven ways to drastically increase your chance of success? Yes, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy. The secret behind almost all proven performers is having a system for achieving their goals.
That seems simple right, obvious even, but it’s true. How many pro athletes go to practice without a plan on what to work on? How many established businesses launch a product and just hope it succeeds with no structure behind it to ensure it has the best chance of success? If elite performers take a methodical approach to reach their goals then why don’t we?
With some forethought and strategy, we can be much more effective in reaching our goals. To do this though, it might also be important to pay attention to how we structure our goals. That’s where SMART goals come in.
S.M.A.R.T. Goals
You may have heard of SMART goals before. I have, and yet it’s funny how often I’ll have a half-conscious goal in my head and won’t go through the process of making sure its specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Like everything else just knowing about it won’t help, it has to be implemented to be useful.
Deciding: Is it specific and relevant
You probably have at least an idea of a potential goal for yourself, some improvement that you want to make in some area of your life. If we want to be successful though we need to be specific, as well as making sure we’re aiming at the right thing in the first place.
How can we do this? Well, we need to ask ourselves some more questions before we dive headfirst into accomplishing our goal. Let’s consider the following questions to solidify our goal and purpose.
- Why do you want to do this?
- Think of the opposite- What don’t you want? (Sometimes thinking about what we don’t want helps us clarify what we do want.)
- Is this the only or best solution for getting what you really want?
- Are you ready to pursue this goal?
- What trade-offs or sacrifices will you have to make to succeed?
- What will happen if you don’t do this?
Let’s assume you’re off to a good start and you already have a semi-specific goal. We can walk through some of these questions and see how they help us make better goals.
We will say that your goal is to lose 20 pounds in the next 6 months. That seems like a reasonable goal, and it already seems to check at least 4/5 of the SMART goal qualifiers. Its specific, measurable, attainable, and time-bound. Now we just have to make sure it’s relevant right?
Going back to our questions, let’s start with the “why” question. We need to make sure we are addressing the root problem. A technique knows as the 5 why’s can help us do that. It’s as simple as it sounds but it can be very effective. Essentially you ask why and continue to until you reach the rock bottom of your problem, which is usually 5 or less “why’s”.
So why do we want to lose 20 pounds in the next 6 months? “I want to be healthier.” Ok, that makes sense, why do you want to be healthier, why don’t you feel healthy enough like you are? “Well, my jeans are getting tighter, I can’t play with my kids the way I want to, and I feel like I’m getting weaker.”
Alright, so now we see what is compelling the desire for change. In our hypothetical situation, you want to be more healthy, stronger, and have a smaller waistline. The reason this is important is that losing weight is actually a bad metric for this. If you want to get stronger, slimmer, and fitter you will most likely want to convert fat to muscle. Muscle is more dense than fat, so depending on where you’re starting from you may actually gain weight while reaching your true goals.
Measuring
How should we measure our goal then? Well, our measurement should be in line with our true goal. The original goal was to be measured in pounds, but the actual goal had 3 separate components to it which should be measured accordingly: health, which could be measured in energy, mood, or nutrition, strength which could be measured in weight & repetitions of different exercises, and finally slimness based on waistline inches lost. Now we are measuring things that are directly correlated with our true goals.
Is it attainable?
Of course, we want to be realistic with our goals while at the same time challenging ourselves. It’s a delicate balance between not discouraging yourself with a goal that is too difficult, while at the same time not leaving some potential on the table because you didn’t select a goal that pushed you to be the best you can be.
Making sure your goal is attainable is not only about what is possible for you, but also about whether you’re willing to make the required sacrifices needed to attain it. That may mean different things for each goal, but all goals require commitment and the sacrifice of your time, effort, and other opportunities that you could be pursuing instead. To be realistic about what will be required will help you not only decide whether you are ready to commit or not but will also help you mentally prepare for what will be required and the more prepared you are, the greater your chance of success.
Time-Bound
A big part of SMART goals is eliminating vagueness. We want to be as clear and precise as we can about our goals. Part of that is having a deadline and even a tentative timeline along the way. Sometimes we avoid putting deadlines on things because that makes it concrete and now failure becomes a real possibility. If you say “I want to learn to play an instrument sometime in the future” then you’ve never technically failed until you no longer have a future. But if you say “I want to be able to play Stairway To Heaven all the way through on the guitar within the next 6 months”, then at the end of 6 months you will know if you failed or not and how far you have come.
Putting a deadline on our goals makes failure a possibility but also success. It also helps you be more are aware of the effort needed to accomplish your goal. Keep in mind Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the time available for its completion) and use it to your advantage.
Process Over Outcomes
The reason SMART goals are so useful is that it’s not just about the goal or outcome but it helps you to start thinking about the process to get there. When we stop and think for even just a second we know that the process implemented to reach a goal is as important, if not more important, than the goal itself. In any competition, everyone wants to win but what makes the difference is preparation and talent.
On top of that, we can not always control the outcome but we can control the process and our dedication to it. That means our best tool, with the most leverage, is our ability to create a system designed to help us reach our goal.
Does that mean that the outcome or end result is irrelevant? Of course not but the most helpful mindset to moving forward is using results as feedback for whether your process is working. When I was competing in Kickboxing there were times that I won and times that I lost. My goal was the same each time, but the fight and end result helped me to know what was working and what wasn’t. The times I learned and grew the most as a fighter wasn’t from the wins but from the losses. Again that doesn’t mean I wanted to lose or was even ok with it. In fact, you only get useful information if you’re trying your best to actually achieve the result you want but in trying my best and coming up short I could see what skills needed improvement.
We are biased towards results. Results are what we want out of life in many ways and we know outsiders judge us based on our achievements but this is a flawed metric to try and use. I say this for a few reasons. Everyone is in a different situation, what might be a valiant effort for one person is laziness in another and for the most part, we won’t know which is which especially by looking at results alone. Some people are able to float by with talent even if they have a poor work ethic and an ineffective process. However, eventually, someone with equal talent but a greater work ethic or process will surpass them.
Furthermore, there will always be someone with more talent than us in some area of life that seems important to us. There can only be one #1 in any category so if you had a crazy goal like becoming a billionaire and by some miracle you manage to achieve that, there’s always Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos to make you feel bad if you’re comparing yourself on the basis of money or a general notion of success. However, if you set a more pertinent goal like making a contribution to the world that only you could make and doing your best to succeed in doing that (whatever that would look like) then that’s something that only you can achieve, and only you can know how hard you tried to maximize your potential.
Comparing yourself to other people especially in a way that is not specifically relevant to your true goals will only sidetrack your process and misalign your focus.
Ultimately our goals are not just about achievement or even outcomes but should be about utilizing as much of our potential as possible. To get there the only meaningful comparison is to who we were yesterday. So it’s important to get to the root of what we want, why we want it, and how to get there; embracing the journey and focusing on what we can control while using results to inform us on if we should change our approach and to what degree.
TLDR
- Goals aren’t enough, you also need a system to effectively reach them.
- Using SMART goals is a good way to structure your goals and helps you start to consider what that process might look like.
- SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Before selecting a goal make sure you understand the bottom-level reason that you want to achieve it. 5 why’s is a useful tool for finding that reason.
- Make sure your process accounts for that bottom-level reason.
- Having the right goal is important but so is having the right process, make sure they are working together and don’t become overly fixated on outcomes alone.
- Don’t compare yourself to other people, every person has a unique situation. Only you know what you’re capable of and if you are living up to your potential or not.