The three steps to reach your Goals
Not reaching goals can be demotivating. But not setting clear goals is even worse. And not setting them correctly will cause missed goals. So let’s look at three steps that you can take to ensure that you’ll reach your goals.
Set Input goals
The idea of input goals is something that I first heard from from Ali Abdaal. And the idea is simple:
We cannot control the outcome of things. We can work towards certain outcomes, but in the end there will always be outside influences that’ll decide the result.
With this realization, we should concentrate on the things that we can control: Our input.
When writing my master thesis I originally set the goal of finishing chapter X by the end of month Y. But I just couldn’t motivate myself to properly work on it until my girlfriend suggested to instead work 6 hours every day on it. And when I did that, I suddenly made a lot of progress and finished it in a fraction of the time that I procrastinated before.
Input goals shouldn’t be too ambitious, though. They should be enough to reach your long-term goals eventually (most really don’t have a time limit), but reaching them consistently is more important than having grand goals.
Success motivates us
Input goals are designed to keep us going and ensure that we’ll work on our long-term goals and are not demotivated if the output isn’t what we expect it to be. They should be easy to reach. At the same time, they also need to be enough to reach your long-term goal in the end. Had I just worked one hour a day, I would’ve failed.
Become “lucky”
A bit of luck is needed for most big successes (aka outcomes), but we can also, in a way, force luck. If we continuously set up a chance and work towards minimizing the amount of luck needed, we’ll eventually get “lucky”.
We are terrible at noticing continuous change
Unless we have clear milestones, we’ll underestimate how much we’ve improved. If you work on your typing speed and improve 1 word per minute per day, then you’ll likely never notice a proper speed-up. But if you suddenly hit a concrete milestone of 100WPM, you’ll automatically be prompted to reflect on how far you’ve come.
Set output goals
Input goals are great to get us started, but there is one big problem with them: perfectionism.
Perfectionism is just procrastinating when you’re already done.
I used to use perfectionism as an excuse for taking long to finish something. But usually it’s more important to finish than to improve it slightly.
The 80:20 rule
The 80:20 rule (or pareto principle) is found everywhere. It says that 80% of the result is caused by 20% of the input. The other 20% then take other 80% of the input to finish.
So once we’ve finished something, even if we don’t have it 100% perfect, getting it from the 80% that we’re at currently to that magical 100, will take us another 4 times as much time as what we’ve already invested.
Most of the time, this is just not worth it.
Finish your projects
So, you’re now putting in X amount of work as your input goal. But how do you decide when to move on from the current focus of your work to the next one?
Let’s say you have a goal of spending three hours a week to write a blog post. By itself this will make you write and produce content, but it will not necessarily make you show your work.
If you also have the goal to publish one blog post a week, then you’ll try to make sure that at the end of those three hours, you’ll publish your work.
Think small and short
Output goals need to be short-term and realistic. Realistic, because it’s worth nothing if you can’t hit it and short-term, because you cannot predict the future and the farther you try to plan the more likely you’ll fail.
Re-evaluate your goals
If you already have goals but no idea how to hit those, then this point is the most important to you.
Bad goals are worse than no goals!
Goals you can’t reach
Goals you know you won’t reach will only demotivate you, because once you’ve realized that you won’t succeed, you’ll loose all drive. And once the time is up, you’ll feel bad for “failing”.
But you didn’t suddenly fail once the day of the goal is reached. The mistake was made in estimating that goal. And the best time to fix a mistake is now.
So if you have goals that you already know you won’t reach, then adapt those goals now.
Goals you don’t want to reach
The same goes for goals that you don’t want to reach anymore or that you could reach, but at a steep price.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s because you’re feeling the burn out coming, you don’t have the time anymore to work towards those goals or simply, because your focus has shifted and that goal isn’t that important to you anymore. There is no shame in changing goals, because there is no point in keeping goals that make you feel and perform worse.
Conclusion
Goal setting is important. It ensures that you have something to work towards. But goals can also hinder you if you have the wrong ones.
In short, when setting goals you should
- set small goals that are easily completed,
- schedule them for completion soon and
- always ask “why am I doing this?” and do not be afraid to adapt or remove a goal if you don’t have a good answer anymore.
