Your goals will not achieve
themselves and will regrettably require your vigorous participation.
Years ago, my boss,
who's the vice president of human resources at our company, asked me to
write my goals for the year. Having never had any training in, and no real
reason for, writing professional goals, I went back to my boss for guidance.
But, getting help from him was a lot like having a 3-year-old help you
cook dinner -- after a while you just want to tell the kid to go set the
table and forget everything else.
However, with my goals,
my future compensation (corporate-speak for "bonus") depended on
getting them down on paper. So, because they were due in a matter of hours,
I hastily scrawled some thoughts that I knew would stimulate
some discussion. I don’t remember them all, but two of them
were to be naked at the office more, and to be waist-deep in gravy.
My boss looked at my
list of bizarre aspirations and paused thoughtfully before observing that
most of these were “personal goals.” We reached the conclusion that
they needed to be redone and, true to my intentions, I received some
good-natured advice on how to write better goals. Much of that advice was
predictable, as is so often the case when the equivalent of garbage is neatly
wrapped in a floor tortilla to look like a tasty burrito: i.e., a lot
of inedible crap.
I’ve since made a study
of goal-writing, and it’s worth pointing out that unless you have goals, you have
no way of knowing whether or not you’ve already reached the pinnacle of your
life (or the nadir, for that matter). But all this tends to be a bit
easier to suss out if you have those goals in hand.
There’s a heck of a lot
more to writing goals than following the time-honored but threadbare formula of
SMART: Specific Measurable Achievable ... uh, I don’t remember what the
other two letters stand for, so let’s go with Retroactive and Tumultuous.
None of this
matters because I don’t care about SMART goals, mainly because when you
live in Detroit, the acronym SMART stands for Southeast Michigan Regional
Transit Authority (don’t try to reason this out; it doesn’t make sense and
never will). And the people I’ve seen waiting for SMART buses look like anything
but.
That’s not to criticize
people who take mass transit in cities that actually have good mass transit; but one of your life goals should be to
never have to ride a SMART bus. Trust me.
1. Write goals that align with
your values.
For my money, there isn’t
a huge difference between corporate goals and life goals. If your career
goals aren’t supporting your life goals, you are bound to have a miserable
existence. Take the case of a good friend of mine who plotted out his
entire life at age 16.
He would graduate from
high school at 18, go to college and get a degree in aeronautic design,
graduate from college at 22, work for a contract services company for four
years and eventually get a secure job at a large firm where he would
retire in luxury after 30 years. The only problem was that he ended up
hating the work he still does for the large firm. And he's counting down,
to the minute, how long he has until he retires. Death at a
desk, every single day.
2. Set goals that you can
control.
I have another friend
who at 28 had never had a girlfriend, at least one that other people could see.
He announced out of the blue one day that he was going to get married when
he turned 30. Being the supportive friend that I am, I quickly suggested
that to make that happen he would need to waste no time and propose to every
women he saw from that moment on if he thought he had the slightest chance
of meeting his goal by 50 (as 30 was clearly out of the question). (And if he
has proposed to you, you have my sincerest apologies.)
Too often, we set goals
that depend on other people, and I don’t know how many other people you’ve
ever met, but most are universally unreliable, especially when it comes to
something that you need that benefits them not a whit. Unless
every aspect of the goal you set is under your control, you have very little
likelihood of ever achieving it.
3. Think big.
I read an article (in Entrepreneur, no less) about how to make your first
million. The author suggested that the best way to do that is not to focus
on making your first $1 million, but on making your first $20 million.
That makes sense,
because if you concentrate on making your first $20 million and you fall short,
you still will likely have made your first million. For my part, my plan
for making my first $1 million has always been to marry a rich,
elderly and sickly woman and insure her heavily. Women of this sort
are in surprisingly short supply and you'd better act quickly because they tend
to die almost immediately.
Add to that the fact
that the only woman who ever dated me more than three times was my recently
deceased ex-wife who, while sickly, was neither rich nor insurable,
leading to a marriage of biblically disastrous proportions (think F. Scott
and Zelda, had F. Scott instead married a howler monkey with a rapacious PCP
habit, and F. Scott was a slob who always left his socks on the floor,
while blowing all his money on hats and rock tumbling supplies).
So, anyway, uh, think
big: Set goals that you don’t think you can achieve and work your tail off to
get there. Anyone can follow the advice of lesser men and set clearly
achievable goals, but that’s for under-achievers and slackers. To be
clear, I’m not suggesting you set impossible goals
-- like teaching your dog to fly by throwing a Frisbee off a high-rise
balcony or developing a way to genetically engineer a teacup rhino by cross
breeding armadillos with house cats -- but there is nothing wrong with setting
your sights higher than most might believe practicable.
4. Give yourself time.
It’s said that good
things come to those who wait (with the obvious exception of those who wait for
SMART buses), and there is some truth to that. Of course you should be
doing things that take you closer to your goal instead of living in your
parents' basement until you’re 30 and supporting yourself by selling curios on
eBay. If you begin with the end in mind, that is to say, if you start by
visualizing where you want to end up in life, the things you need to get there
are pretty easy to plot out.
5. Plan for success.
Don’t worry that your
dreams aren’t realistic or that you might not achieve them -- after
all, you have friends and relatives to shoot holes in your dreams.
Instead, ask not, “What if I fail?” but rather, “What if I succeed?” Worry
about failure is pointless and destructive; the surest way to be a failure is
to spend time worrying about it. Your goals won’t just accomplish themselves;
you will have to have a plan, and you’ll have to work that plan.
6. Manage your risks.
You will never achieve
goals you didn’t set, but then again there are precious few guarantees in
this life. It’s said that the only sure things in life are death and
taxes; well, I’m here to tell you the only sure thing in life is death,
because there are plenty of people who don’t pay their taxes and usually end up
either in jail, gunned down by government agents or working in
politics. So, do pay your taxes.
And while most of the
things you will do on your journey to success will carry some measure of risk,
that’s okay. Just be sure that you consider that risk and weigh it against
the reward.
Written By: Phil La Duke
Credit: Entrepreneur.com
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