Freshening Up Your Goals
Let's start off with this question - should we even bother setting goals? All of us have at some point written down those things in life that we really wanted to go after and then while cleaning out a backpack 6 months later found that same scrunched up piece of paper buried under all our books and gone, oh yeah.
Goal setting can often feel like a futile exercise. With some goals I never seem to make progress and while other things that aren't really goals happen all on their own.
Our issues often come with how we're setting and prioritizing our goals. Plus there is the whole issue where I lie to myself about how if it's important I'll remember - even with those big goals, we can still forget. One of the lessons I've learned is that if I want to set an effective goal I need to be reminded of it - and not just once in a while, daily is best.
Beyond that, we can start looking towards Goal Setting Theory to start rounding out how we want to think about setting our goals. Goal setting theory began in the 1960s and its core claim is that there is a relationship between goals and performance and then that having a goal modifies how we behave.
Edwin Locke’s “Toward a theory of task motivation and incentives," lays out our first cornerstones of Goal Setting Theory - first that hard goals produce better outcomes than easy goals, and, second, that a specific goal produces a better outcome than a goal of “do your best” or not having a goal at all.
More plainly put, a difficult goal is better than an easy goal and a specific goal is better than a broad goal.
Goal setting theory also states that there are 4 key mechanisms for completing goals. I like to think of the levers - they're all important but you'll need to pull down on them in various different ways depending on the goal you are working on.
Those levers are:
Focus
Effort
Persistence
Strategy
The first three mechanisms are motivational - they're what are going to get us into gear to make the goal happen.
Focus is what lets us prioritize the goal and keep it at the forefront of our minds. The more difficult the goal is the more effort we are going to have to put in. And with any worthwhile endeavor, we are going to need the persistence to stick with it.
But it doesn't always matter how hard we try at something or how long we stick with it if we're not doing the right things. That's where our fourth lever comes into play - what's our strategy for completing this going. On those really hard goals, we need to focus on the process - on doing the right things.
This might lead us to think that strategy is then the most important aspect, but your strategy won't get you anywhere with our focus, effort, and persistence. The key is combining these levers so that we can effectively reach our goals. Every goal we complete is going to need all four elements at some point, but we don't have to think about pulling on them all at the same time. Sometimes we'll need to pay more attention to our focus, while other times we'll need to pay more attention to the effort. Sometimes we can let up on our persistence and let things simmer and sometimes our strategy won't matter as long as we're putting in the work.
We're also going to want to think about what makes something a good goal.
A good goal serves 4 basic functions:
It should motivate and inspire us
It should guide our future planning
It should help direct our daily tasks and decisions
It should help us evaluate and improve ourselves
Typically I'm fairly conservative with the word "should" but I'm including it here because these are the things that we want to see out a good goal. If it isn't motivating or helping us improve why is it a goal. If we can't use it for our future and daily planning it probably isn't actionable.
Goals serve a very specific purpose in our lives. They're us verbalizing what we want and how we're going to go after that. And they absolutely need those two components.
I know it sounds a little off to think about how a goal might be something we don't want, but sometimes our goals are influenced by other factors. Perhaps we want the fancy car because our neighbor got one, or we want to become a doctor because that's what your parents want. Sometimes we explicitly know when we want something because of outside pressure, but there are also plenty of times when we've never thought about why we want something.
Broadly we can think of goals as fitting into three different types: outcome, performance, and process.
Often when we're talking about goals we're thinking of them in terms of outcome and performance. These are the tangibles goals that we can measure. A clear example here could be winning a race - or even say finishing a race. You can clearly see if the outcome happened or not. For a performance goal, we're looking at how we performed - so if we stick with the race idea we could have a goal of getting our 5k time under 30 minutes.
But all of our goals aren't going to be like that - we can also have goals that are harder to measure and aren't strictly about the outcome. This is where we get our process goals. These are goals that are strictly about improving our skills or processes. These kinds of goals are about your individual actions and can't be qualitatively measured in the same way outcome and performance goals are.
For example, we may have a process goal of study Spanish 20 minutes a day - while this goal may be part of a larger goal of learning a new language, you can complete this goal regardless of that implicit outcome-based goal.
The distinction here may seem purely semantic, but it's important to keep in mind while we're setting these goals. One of the keys of goal setting is that we want to challenge ourselves, and this is especially true in those outcome and performance goals. By making those goals hard we can often rise to the challenge, but with process goals, if we set the bar too high it's easy for us to overextend ourselves and get demotivated. Process goals aren't so much about pulling that effort lever, but more about the ones for focus and persistence.
All right, I'd like to finish up today with a story of Mike Flint and Warren Buffett - this story may or may not be apocryphal but it still has some great lessons in it.
Mike Flint was Buffett's personal pilot for 10 years and so they had many interactions over the years. In one such interaction Buffet was helping Flint go over his career priorities with a 3-step exercise.
Here's how it works and you can work along at home if you want.
Step 1 - First Flint was instructed to write down his top 25 career goals - take your time with this and while getting to 25 can seem like a bit of a stretch at first once you get going it tends to help the process out. I did this and it took roughly 15 minutes... and then 20 minutes later I was still thinking of new things to add to the list.
Step 2 - Next Flint was asked to review and circle his top 5 goals. Take your time here and really think about which things you want to do the most and which will have the biggest impact.
Step 3 - Now Flint had two lists. The 5-item list of his most important goals (let's call it list-A) and then a second list of 20 lower priority goals.
Obviously, we want to be working on those top five goals, but here's where we get a twist. Buffett now asked Flint what he was going to do with the goals on the second list.
Flint responded that top-5 would be his primary focus but that he'd work on the items on the second list intermittently when he had time. They weren't urgent but he'd still dedicate effort to everything on both lists.
But he had it wrong. Buffett instead told him the second list was now his "Avoid-At-All-Costs" list - that no matter what those things don't get any attention until you've succeeded with your top-5.
When I read this story I remember having a fairly visceral response - I did not like it. The idea of making those things that I wanted to do go on my "not-to-do" list was uncomfortable at best. But as I mulled it over, it started to feel like there might be some truth to the idea.
Again, I don't know the authenticity of this story, but it resonates in a lot of ways once I got over my initial revulsion to the idea of avoiding doing my low priority goals.
Last week's episode focused on decluttering the physical things our lives - think of this process as a way of decluttering what we do with our time. Everything we do has a cost. They cost time, energy, space, money - nothing is completely free.
Often when we're looking at our goals we think of them in terms of any benefit - that is we think about how they might benefit us without thinking about that cost. And those items on list B also have a cost and often that cost comes at the expense of those things we want to do on list A. Those goals 6-25 are still important to you and they might derive some benefit to your life, but not nearly the same benefit as you'd get from actually completing one of those top 5 tasks.
For example, when I was going through my list for this podcast one of the things that I wrote down is that I could write additional blog articles to supplement the podcast. I mean I do a lot of writing already so I could probably start publishing on another platform like Medium and that would absolutely help grow the podcast's audience. However, that's not in my top 5 goals for the podcast - probably not even top 10 - and the time I spent doing that could easily be spent on doing something that actually a higher priority.
To be clear here, I'm not saying never do those tasks ever - what this exercise is saying is to do those things only after your top 5. All we're doing is prioritizing and then accepting the fact that if we try and do those lower priority things we're spreading ourselves too thin.
Additionally, one thing to keep in mind is that this was focused on Mike Flints Career goals. We're not going to hit all our life domains in one list - if I ignored everything else for my overall top 5 I probably wouldn't be doing this podcast - not that it isn't important to me, just that there are a lot of areas in my life that need to take priority first.
None the less this is still a worthwhile exercise to do because it helps you focus on what's important and what needs to be put to the side. And think about it in terms of setting your goals for the month or perhaps for the quarter. Every month you can get a fresh slate and decide on which things you really need to focus on because those are things that are going to be making the biggest difference in your life.
This Episode’s Top Tips
There are 4 mechanisms we need to keep in mind when trying to complete our goals, those are focus, effort, persistence, and strategy.
We can think of goals fitting into three broad categories - outcome, performance, and process. Outcome and performance goals focus on things we can measure and process goals focus on the things that we do.
With an any benefit approach to our goals we're going to end up trying to focus on doing everything - instead, we need to prioritize those things that are most important and do them before we even think about those lower priority goals.
