Daily Goals

One of the habits I picked up at a young age was learning from people who know more than me. A lot of people know more than me.... So, I ask a TON of questions. Just ask my parents, they eventually bought me a dictionary to keep next to me because I asked the meaning of so many words as a kid.

If you're successful, accomplished, working on something I don't know about, get ready to be peppered with a million questions about what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how you're doing it.

So recently, I got to spend 48 hours tied to the hip with one of our company's best account executives. I'm not in sales, but I wanted to hear from him what he does and thinks and how it makes him successful. I learned A LOT in those 48 hours, but the one thing that stuck out to me the most was his breakdown of goals into manageable bite-sized chunks. What he and other successful people call their "daily goals".

He's in sales, so his daily goals don't correlate to my day to day job, but I'm sure you're interested in what's made him wildly successful for over 20 years. His goals weren't numbered, they were lettered:

• M - Set a meeting today
• O - Find an opportunity today
• Q - Send a quote today.

His rationale: "If I can do one of those 3 a day for a year, I'll be successful."

I definitely don't wake up like billionare Jesse Itzler and my friend and consciously think about my daily goals. I'm also not wildly successful like them either... Hmmm correlation?

So, I started thinking.... What are my daily goals? Do I even have any? I've never written them down in a notebook on a daily basis like my friend did when he first started. I do have what I call BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), my yearly and lifelong goals written down that I'm working towards, but nothing that I could call a daily goal. There has to be some driving daily force behind what's brought success to me in my career/life.

Looking back on 15+ years of advancing responsibility in technology roles, I realized my daily professional goals were pretty consistent across the decade+:

• Learn something new today
• Help solve a problem today
• Make progress on a project/task/duty today

Of course there were many days those goals weren't accomplished, but for the most part those were my daily goals to a successful future.

If your BHAG is migrating SAP servers to AWS in HA across regions, what's your daily goal?

If your BHAG is to promote a cybersecurity culture shift from internal business units, what's your daily goal?

Break down your big projects and goals with small, easy to mange, bite-sized goals that you can accomplish. Some even call these "baby steps".

So, what are your daily goals?