#24 Goals

I've always harboured a curious cynicism for goals. But that harbour has been full with flotsam and jetsam of internal dissonance.

What if my gut-feeling that goals can be counter-productive is wrong, and I fail to achieve the great heights of professional and personal success and happiness because of a lack of them?

Research has shown that 41% of Americans surveyed, agree that achieving their goals had failed to make them any happier, or (worse) had left them disillusioned. A further 18% said their goals had destroyed a friendship, a marriage, or another significant relationship. And ironically, 36% said that the more goals they set for themselves, the more stressed they felt, even though 52% said that one of their goals was to reduce the amount of stress in their lives.

My ever-present but subtle mistrust of goal-setting has always been conflicted with a creeping fear that I may not 'achieve' unless I set and reach goals.

Fortunately, I got to talking with a key note speaker at a conference a while back and he shared my healthy suspicion of goals. He also shared a book recommendation, which turned out to be one of the most significant book recommendations I’ve ever had! “The Antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking ” by Oliver Burkeman , a book that I highly recommend.?

What The Experts Say

If you are a goal-setting fan, you’ve probably heard of Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar or Brian Tracy. These guys gargle the glory of goal-setting for breakfast (usually at 4.30am).

They have each referenced a compelling 1953 longitudinal Yale study that took the graduating class of ’53 and asked them about their career plans and life goals. After 20 years, researchers followed up with that class and discovered that the 3% who had specific and written goals in 1953 had gone on to earn more money than the other 97% combined!

But hold up. Before reaching for your pen and paper, it turns out that this research never happened and the experts made it up.

Fast Company went looking for the research in the late 90s, and eventually asked Brian Tracy what his source was. He said Tony Robbins. Fast Company then asked Tony Robbins what his source was. He said Zig Ziglar. They then asked Zig Ziglar what his source was. He said Brian Tracy!

Was that a gaggle of goal-setting gurus achieving their own goals, on lies?

Who wouldn’t buy-into Tracy’s goal promise from his book, “Goals! How to Get Everything You Want – Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible”, in which he says ‘Living without clear goals is like driving in a thick fog … Clear goals enable you to step on the accelerator of your own life, and race ahead rapidly’. No one likes driving in thick fog, and everyone wants to race ahead rapidly, right?

Another motivation guru, Ed Forman (who made his first million by age 26), coached people to answer "Fantastic!" when they were asked how their day was going. All day. Every day. Regardless of how it was actually going. This was supposed to improve your life, too. For me it’s the short-hand equivalent of saying “Living the dream” through clenched teeth.

As with goals, I’ve also held a healthy scepticism of hyped-up motivation gurus in general. They always appeared to be more hype than guru.

What My Gut Tells Me

Rather than jumping to a conclusion that goals are good (guru-encouraged) or bad (gut-encouraged), I’ve carried that internal dissonance around with me for a good two decades. Through the highs and lows of goal-setting and goal-vacuums in a professional context and a personal one.

Doing this has allowed me the luxury of time to read, reflect and dwell on the merits and perils of goals with an open mind.

Goals are effectively targets, ambitions, aspirations and dreams that are simply specific and written down. Regardless of their subject, they all have one thing in common: The future.

Research and reality remind us that we have less control over the future than what we like to think.

In Antedote, Burkeman interviews Albert Ellis, a maverick psychotherapist in his twilight of life and who now lives on through his legacy, the Albert Ellis Institute . Ellis wisely observed "If you accept the universe is uncontrollable, you're going to be a lot less anxious".

We control so little, that most goals are, at best, fractionally within our control. But we like to think we control the factors that will allow us to achieve the goals we set. It’s the way we resolve the anxiety that comes with uncertainty: Thinking, planning and goal-setting for the future.

Burkeman observes that we’re motivated to set goals because of how “deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future – not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present”.

My gut feels more comfortable with a direction of travel than a fixation on a fixed target in the future as a distraction from uncertainty. That approximate destination can be very helpful in quelling anxiety, without ignoring uncertainty! But first, what are goals and why do they exist inside and outside work.

The Anatomy of Goals

There are various types of goals that span the professional and personal domains, including:

• KPIs – Key Performance Indicators: Typically geared to focus, motivate and reward.
• OKRs – Objectives and Key Results: Providing traceability back to strategic intentions.
• SMART Goals – Admirably Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based goals.
• BHAGs – Big Hairy Audacious Goals: Fancifully named to galvanise you behind them, or to distract you from the infeasibility of achieving them?
• Career Goals – Identifying a pathway through your career.
• Financial Goals – Setting sights on revenue, profit of savings achievements.
• Stretch Goals – Typically set up to challenge and reward ‘over and above’ base goals.

The latter three (possibly four) can be personal or professional. The first three (or 4) are typically used in a professional context.

These goals can also often overlap and coalesce; goal setting is a pretty fluid field! For example, I once hired a university graduate who had a BHAG Career goal in the first sentence of his resume that read: “My ultimate career objective is to one day take on the role of Chief Information Officer of a large scale, international company”. I both admired and cringed at the hairiness of his big, audacious goal.

We discussed his Day-1-out-of-University-BHAG and my philosophy regarding career goals, which [spoiler alert] are very similar to my philosophy of goals. I still juggle the merits and perils of his goal and continue to watch his career journey with great curiosity .

The Fixed Nature of Goals

“Set some goals and change them whenever the environment or circumstances dictate”

...said no leader . Ever.

Yet we are told to embrace the unpredictability of the new VUCA world we live in, and that the only constant is change .

Chris Keyes coined a phrase in 2004 that talks to the risk of holding on to goals beyond the point of reason. It was off the back of his first-hand experiences of Mt Everest summitting disasters. The term is Goalodicy (the obsessive pursuit of goals to the point of self-destruction), and is based on the term ‘theodicy’, which describes the effort required to maintaining a belief that there is a benevolent God.

In Rule 8 (Tell The Truth – Or At Least, Don’t Lie) of Jordan B Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45718470-12-rules-for-life ), a sentence on goal setting leapt out of an otherwise average book. It read “If you bend everything totally, blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal, and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you, and the world, better”. The open possibilities of alternative futures that this statement speaks to really resonated with me.

There’s clearly a tension between setting and flexing goals, particularly in a professional context. We’re encouraged to discuss and agree annual performance goals that are then locked in. These will prove our success or failure, our bonus payment or performance management, our bouquets or brickbats, being promoted or passed over.

If you have to move the goal-posts mid-game, surely that’s not fair. That’s making the game easier for you to win. Ego and pride can kick in on both sides of that professional table.

Ego and pride play a similar role in personal goals, especially if they involve BHAG achievements like summitting a peak, running 10 ultramarathons, or getting to $10M net worth before 20.

While inflexibility with professional goals that result in a failure to achieve them is only likely to impact your ego, reputation, pocket or promotion chances, not flexing personal ones when their infeasibility emerges can have much more dire consequences.

Beware goalodicy!

Goals and Two Horizons

I generally think about goals in two horizons (noting that how I think about workplace goals has limited influence over what those goals are likely to be):

1. My long-term goals are oblique , opaque and approximate. There’s a general direction of travel, a ‘cone of possibilities’ that defines the way toward them, but their precision is general. This is where my future is.
2. My present-day goals are immediate, SMART and guided by my values . This is the present.

If I’m able to hold both horizons in view concurrently, I’ll be able to ‘trim the sails’ as I execute my present-day goals to ensure I remain on course and within the cone of possibilities of my longer-term ones.

Some may accuse me of risking “under-achieving” or (worse) “cheating”, after all, I’m avoiding setting any BHAGs or fixating on a perfect, long-term future achievement. But goal-setting (and life in general) is not a competition or a game, it’s a journey.

In Antedote, Burkeman interviews Steve Shapiro, a former all-American goal-setting achiever, who “destroyed his marriage” through an obsession with goals. Unsurprisingly, this goal-setting, go-getter tried to pull out of his nose-dive by setting new goals. But eventually, it took a conversation with a friend who observed that he spent too much of his energy thinking about his future to break his goal obsession.

Shapiro now maintains “You can have a broad sense of direction without a specific goal or a precise vision of the future. I think of it like jazz, like improvisation. It’s all about meandering with purpose”.

If you can picture your life as a journey, then the sage advice from the Chinese Philosopher, Lao Tzu, is a great place to end this article: “A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent upon arriving”.

Travel well. Meander with purpose.