Your Best Year Ever, Chapter 7: Great Goals Check Seven Boxes

0:02Well, hey there. First of all, thank you. You're nearing the end of your best year ever on this podcast and I'm thrilled to have been with you on this journey. And I truly hope you found immense value in what you've heard. And remember, while listening provides insights, having the book in hand lets you constantly refer back to it, ensuring that the lessons stay with you throughout the year. There are detailed exercises in the physical book designed for you to take a deep dive into the content. It's a tool that you can use repeatedly to recalibrate, refocus, and get your best year ever, every year.

0:39And here's something exciting. For those of you who buy the book before December the 31st, 2023, there's a special bonus I wanna tell you about. So head over to your bestyeareverbook.com, input your order number, and in return, I'm gonna give you a free ticket to our biggest virtual event of the year. It's called Your Best Year Ever Live. Now, this isn't just another event. It's a chance for you to delve deeper into the book's content and expand on it and make sure that you actually apply it to your life. So imagine leaving that event with a full set of goals for the upcoming year, plus a solid plan on how to achieve them.

1:17Normally the tickets for that event, they go for$197, but with your book purchase, you get in for free. That's right. Absolutely free. It's my way of saying thank you and ensuring that you have everything you need for an incredible year. So if you're eager to make the most of the insights and you don't want to wait for the remaining podcast episodes, grab your copy from Amazon or Audible. Don't miss out. Secure your book and your free ticket to Your Best Year Ever Live at yourbestyeureverbook.com. Hope to see you there. Chapter 7. Great Goals. Check seven boxes. Do not think or do anything without having some aim in sight.

1:58the person who journeys aimlessly will have labored in vain, Mark the Monk. The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, Dennis Waitley. In 2002, General Motors was determined to boost its share of the U.S. automobile market to 29%, a position the company hadn't held since 1999. The company was obsessed with the number. It offered crazy purchase incentives, such as zero-interest loans to drive sales. Executives even started wearing lapel pins with the number 29 to keep the goal front and center. But they missed it. GM blamed the competition, especially from South Korea.

2:39If the competition would just play a little fair, we could do it, one executive complained. But analysts said GM became so focused on the goal, the company undercut its own business to attain it. Because of the reckless decisions made in pursuit of their goal, The company went bankrupt several years later and became dependent on federal bailout dollars just to survive. And it's not just GM. Other organizations have fallen into similar traps. Remember Enron? Looking at these and other stories, it would be easy to conclude that goal setting is somehow counterproductive, perhaps disastrously so. But that's not my take.

3:16I've been practicing and teaching goal achievement far too long for that. I've also seen and experienced far too many successes. Not only can the pitfalls be easily overcome, but we can actually engineer our goals from the outset to avoid them entirely. Do you still have that list of aspirations you worked on in the start of the book? In this chapter, we'll transform those aspirations, resolutions, and dreams into powerful, compelling, written goals that check seven key boxes. But before I unpack this framework, I want to address why we should bother writing our goals. Since written goals are the foundation on which you build your best year ever, it deserves some explanation.

3:56The importance of written goals. There's a commonly cited Ivy League study that supposedly shows that writing down goals helps us achieve them. The problem is, it's phony. And when people discover this, they sometimes think the benefits of writing down our goals are fake too. But no. Professor Gail Matthews of Dominican University of California conducted her own study not long ago and confirmed the power of writing down our goals. She recruited 267 entrepreneurs, executives, artists, healthcare professionals, educators, attorneys, and other professionals from several different countries. She divided them into five groups and tracked them over several weeks.

4:35Matthews discovered, among other things, that the mere act of writing one's goals boosted achievement by 42%. This gels with my own experience and that of people I coach. Committing your goals to writing is foundational for success for at least five reasons. First, it forces you to clarify what you want. Imagine setting out on a trip with no particular destination in mind. How do you pack? What roads do you take? How do you know when you've arrived? Instead, you start by picking a destination. Clarity is a precondition for writing. Ask any author suffering writer's block. They can't write because they're unsure what they're trying to say.

5:16Second, writing down goals helps you overcome resistance. When we go to the trouble of formulating and recording our goals, we're doing more than dreaming. We're also engaging our intellect. We're processing, self-checking, analyzing, and engaging our sense of agency and control. In a study published by the Journal of Happiness Studies, researchers note that composing to-do lists, creating schedules, filling gratitude journals, and jotting down thoughts about the day leave people feeling clear and resourceful and up to life's challenges. Every meaningful intention, dream, or goal encounters resistance.

5:52From the moment you set a goal, you'll begin to feel it. But the emotional and intellectual engagement of writing them down helps us identify deeply with our goals and forge resolve around our desires. I'll focus on this later in step four. Third, it motivates you to take action. Writing down your goals is only the beginning. Articulating your intention is important, but it's not enough. You must execute your goals. You have to take action. I found that writing down my goals and reviewing them regularly provokes me to take the next most important action. Fourth, it filters other opportunities.

6:28The more successful you become, the more you will be deluged with opportunities. In fact, these new opportunities can quickly become distractions that pull you off course. The only antidote I know of is to maintain a list of written goals by which to evaluate these new opportunities. Establishing your priorities up front equips you to intentionally avoid what some call shiny object syndrome. Fifth, it enables you to see and celebrate your progress. It's particularly difficult when you aren't seeing progress. You feel like you're working yourself to death going nowhere, but written goals can serve like mile markers on a highway.

7:05They enable you to see how far you have come and how far you need to go. They also provide opportunity for celebration when you attain them. I'll cover reasons three through five later in step five. But to get the most of your written goals, as I said before, you need to formulate them to check certain boxes. And that's where my seven-part framework comes in. You've probably heard of SMART goals. They have five different attributes, one for each letter of the SMART acronym, specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and time-bound. My co-author Daniel Harkaby and I use this in our book, Living Forward, General Electric pioneered this approach in the early 1980s.

7:44Others have modified and expanded the SMART framework over the years, including me. The changes I've made to the system are based on insights from the best goal achievement research available and are designed to drive results. Let's dive into the seven attributes of my SMARTER Goals system now. Attribute 1, Specific. The first attribute of smarter goals is that they're specific. Focus is power. You can drive the same amount of water through two pipes and create greater force in one of them just by reducing its diameter. That's similar to what happens when we narrow our goals. What the studies show is that the tougher and more specific the goal, the more likely we are to engage our focus, creativity, intellect, and persistence.

8:26Specific goals direct attention and strategic planning, as well as tell the performer where to concentrate and precisely what to do. Vague goals don't really inspire us, and it's hard to know where to put what little effort and creativity we're willing to invest. Specific goals create a channel for our problem-solving skills, effort, and more. As humans, we're always imagining how the future might work out, how we'd like it to work out. A group of researchers dug into this phenomenon, which is called fantasy realization theory. When our daydreams about the future harden into a firm resolve to make change, we'll have a strong commitment to complete our goals.

9:04However, fantasizing about the future without firmly committing to a goal usually keeps people stuck. In those cases, we know what we'd like to happen, but we never develop a strong drive to take action. Worst of all is when we slip into what the researchers call mere reflections on negative reality. That's when we understand the problem, but can't even imagine a solution. We're back to Charlie and scarcity thinking, and the result is anxiety, gloom, and dread. What this research tells us is that our hopes and dreams are essential for achieving goals, but only when we pair them with a strong motivation to create a specific solution.

9:41Aspirations by themselves are not enough. We have to sharpen high expectations into specific goals. In a study out of Duke University a few years back, researchers found that people with more specific goals gained more momentum and grew in motivation as they progressed. While people with less specific goals had the opposite tendency, they lost steam along the way and reported decline in motivation, even when they made some progress. Greater goal specificity is more important than we realize. It leads to better execution and sustained drive. To formulate a smarter goal, you've got to identify exactly what you want to accomplish.

10:20For example, I could say, write a book. But that's too vague. What's the specific book that I want to write? In my case, I would do better to write something like, finish writing, time rules. That's the working title of the next book I'm writing with my daughter, Megan. Here's another example. Learn photography. Is that specific? No. What aspect of photography do you want to learn? A better goal would be complete lynda.com's Photography 101 course. That's specific. Attribute two, measurable. The second attribute of smarter goals is that they're measurable. In other words, they have built-in criteria you can measure yourself against.

11:00This is important for two reasons. The first is the most obvious. How do you know that you've reached the goal? It's not very helpful or inspiring to say that you want to make more money this year than last. How much more? There's a big difference between a small cost of living raise and driving your commissions up 30%. Same with getting fit. Saying you want to exercise more often doesn't do much. It's not objective. Saying you plan to go to the gym four days a week is different. When the goal is measurable, we know the criteria for success. The second reason is that you need to be able to measure yourself against the goal.

11:34An objective target allows you to set markers and milestones along the way. That means you can chart your progress, and half the fun of goals is in the progress we make. In fact, we experience the strongest positive emotional response when we make progress on our most difficult goals, according to psychology professor Timothy Pitchell. This is especially true when we progress faster than we anticipated. Of course, measuring our progress might also show that we're lagging, but that's actually positive too, because the gap can prompt renewed attention and action. Receiving feedback as a part of measuring our goal, as one psychologist puts it, provides the emotional punch that continually bathes the goal-setting process with emotional experiences of felt satisfaction and felt dissatisfaction.

12:20We're either doing well or not, but we'll never know if the goal isn't measurable to begin with. Attribute number three, actionable. The third attribute of smarter goals is that they're actionable. Goals are fundamentally about what we're going to do. As a result, it's essential to get clear on the primary action when formulating your goals. If we care about our goals and want to make sure they produce results, we need to ensure we're clear on what action we're going to take. As John Doerr says, so you're passionate? How passionate? What actions does your passion lead you to do? How exactly do we gain this sort of clarity when formulating a specific goal?

13:00It may sound simplistic, but I find it's best to use a strong verb to prompt the action you want to take. You don't want something like am or be or have. You want a verb like run, finish, or eliminate. A couple of examples. Be more consistent in writing. Is that actionable? No. That's a state of being verb. But something like write two articles a week or write 500 words each day. That's actionable. It starts with the verb write, and it's clear and directive about the action. Here's another. Be more health conscious. Is that actionable? Not really. Instead, you could say something like walk for 30 minutes five times a week.

13:41Much improved. Specifying the desired action provides immediate direction toward the result, coded in the language of the goal itself. Attribute four, risky. The fourth attribute of smarter goals is that they're a bit risky. Hear me out. Normally, we talk about setting goals that are realistic. That's usually what the R in SMART refers to. But if we start by asking what's realistic, we're likely to set the bar too low. When your Best Year Ever alum, James, discovered our five-day intensive, he was making a six-figure income, but he was unfulfilled at work. He felt unrecognized for his contribution and no longer connected to the mission of the organization.

14:21He knew he needed a change. One response would have been to set a safe goal, say, addressing his problems with his employer. But James didn't do that. I said, enough's enough, he remembered. I literally went back to my employer at the time and said, you know what? Take me off full-time salary. After that, he set a goal to start his own firm. James had a wife and two kids under five, but he was confident he could make a go of his own business. And he did. He even paid off$30 ,000 of debt he accrued when he quit his job. The risk drove the results. Had James gone the safe route, he likely would have accomplished far less.

14:58Why? There's a linear relationship between the degree of goal difficulty and performance, as goal theorists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham say. Looking at the results of almost 400 studies, they conclude, the performance of participants with the highest goals is over 250 % higher than those with the easiest goals. We rise to a challenge, but we hold back when it's easy. Still, safe goals are a constant temptation for us. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has done pioneering research on risk aversion. We're driven more strongly to avoid losses than achieve gains, he says. The aversion to failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to achieve it.

15:40For some, that bias is stronger than others, and it has tremendous upsides, for instance, keeping us out of trouble. But it can disserve us when we set goals, especially if we're unaware of its effect on us. Because failing feels like losing, we're tempted to set small goals we can easily reach in the name of being realistic. We're also likely to slack off once we've reached those small goals. I'm not saying everyone should quit their job or burn the ships, but by focusing on what's supposedly realistic, we can inadvertently trigger our natural impulse to avoid loss and end up accomplishing less than we otherwise might have.

16:15I'm not saying we should set goals that are crazy. I am saying we should set goals that stretch and challenge us. I'll have more to say on this in the following chapter. Attribute 5, Time-Bound. The fifth attribute of smarter goals is that they're time-bound. This could involve a deadline, frequency, start date, time trigger, or a streak target. For example, if I just have the goal read more, it's missing a sense of urgency. It could happen over the next 10 years. It could happen over the next 20 years. Even if I assume it's a New Year's resolution, so it means sometime this year, it's still just out there somewhere.

16:52I can put it off and stop thinking about it. But when I say I want to read two books each month, I've created not only a challenge, but also a focus. Deadlines demand attention and spur action. I'd better get in motion because the clock is ticking. Here's another example. Acquire five new design clients. By when? Acquire five new design clients by December the 31st. That's better. But here's a warning. As you're thinking about assigning deadlines, don't make them all December the 31st. Distant deadlines discourage action. You'll think, I have so much time. It's not due for another 10 or 12 months.

17:31Effort dissipates to fill time. But the reverse is also true. Short time horizons concentrate our effort. Psychologists call this the goal looms larger effect. The tighter the deadline, the more focused and productive we tend to be. A study by Locke and Latham found that workers in one field experiment were able to keep production at 100 % even when their time was cut by 40%. The new deadline created huge gains in productivity, and we can experience the same sort of gains in our personal and private lives when we set near-term goals, leaving more margin for other pursuits. The main thing to watch is your bandwidth.

18:07I recommend setting eight goals per year, but only two or three major deadlines per quarter. Any more than that, and your focus will suffer along with your results. Deadlines are essential for achievement goals. But what about habit goals? I'll explain more about the differences between these two kinds of goals in Chapter 9. But for now, we can focus on different kinds of time keys. Deadlines don't make sense with ongoing activities, but deadlines aren't the only way to key activity to time. If we use frequency statements, start dates, time triggers, or streak targets, we can actually spur the habits we want to cultivate.

18:44Saying exercise more this year is a recipe for an action. But saying run for 30 minutes at the park every weekday at 7 a.m., starting on January the 15th for 90 days, sets you up to win. Not only does it say what kind of exercise and where you're going to do it, and not only does it say for how long, it also tells us exactly when you're going to do it, when you're going to start, and how long it'll be before you consider the habit fully installed. Time keys for habit goals create external cues that trigger action. And they work. After telling study participants about the dangers of heart disease, researchers in the UK recommended exercise as a way to prevent it.

19:25On their own, participants intended to work out, but usually forgot. They had less than a 40 % success rate. I get it. Life's busy. But some were asked to bake a time trigger into their goal. Their success rate was better than 90%. The time trigger helped drive the behavior they wanted to see. I'll show you how you can leverage activation triggers like these in Step 5. Well, hey there. It means the world to me that you've made it this far into the book. Clearly, you've got some exciting things in your future. I can't wait to cheer you on and have it your best year ever. I bet if you've made it this far, you really do feel like it's added a lot of value to your life.

20:06I mean, you wouldn't be listening this far if it hadn't. But would you be willing to share this with someone you know, somebody you care about? If so, just take a quick second, hit the share button, and then send it to someone in your life that you want to have their best year ever.

20:25Attribute six, exciting. The sixth attribute of smarter goals is that they're exciting. They inspire you, in other words. Researchers say that we stand a better chance of reaching our goals if we are internally motivated to do so. External motivations might work for a while, but if we're not getting something intrinsic from the goal, we'll lose interest. That was a challenge James experienced with his prior job. Others set the goals he pursued. That was a big problem for me, he said. I was so caught up with everyone else designing goals for me, I never took the time to do to design them for myself.

20:58It was a game changer for him when he finally determined to take his destiny into his own hands. The biggest difference for me is they no longer were overwhelming goals. They were inspiring goals. When I'm inspired, I want to go. The change came down to one thing. He personally set goals that excited him. Another Your Best Year Ever student struggled with the goal, she said, of getting her accounting caught up in her small business. Important? Yes. Inspiring? Not for her. As a result, she struggled to maintain momentum. We all do. Ayelet Fischbach and Caitlin Woolley of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business researched New Year's resolutions.

21:39They first asked people to rate how much they enjoyed the resolutions they had set and then followed up a couple of months later. Enjoyment turned out to be a key predictor of success. But as Alice Walt reports in the Chicago Booth Review, that's not how people typically choose their goals. They choose ones they feel are important. Fishbox says it's fine to go ahead and set goals that feel important, but don't compromise on pleasure entirely. Don't choose a New Year's resolution you don't enjoy doing. You'll be setting yourself up for failure. Instead, Walton says, tap into your intrinsic motivation.

22:13Go with what excites you. If you don't find your goals personally compelling, you won't have the motivation to push through when things get tough or tedious. This is where you've got to be honest with yourself. Ask, does this goal inspire me? Or does it engage my heart? Am I willing to work hard to make it happen? You might even ask if you find it fun. I usually do for at least some of my goals each year. All of these questions get at something we'll cover in the next step. Finding your why. Remember, we're setting risky goals. We're going to be tempted to quit at some point. Only an exciting goal can access the internal motivation you need to stay the course and achieve your goal.

22:53More on this in step four. Attribute seven, relevant. That brings us to the seventh and final attribute of smarter goals. Effective goals are relevant to your life. This is about alignment, and it comes at the end of the list because it's a good way to gut check your goals before committing to them. Frankly, this is the main area where GM went wrong. But we can all stumble on this point if we're not careful. If we're going to succeed, we need goals that align with the legitimate demands and needs of our lives. Are you a working parent with young kids? Your goals will look much different from those of an empty nester or an undergrad.

23:30Depending on your circumstances, going to med school might not be in the cards right now. Pursuing a new weekend gobbling hobby might put unwanted strain on your family. You need to set goals that are relevant to your actual circumstances and true interests. You also need goals that align with your values. This should be obvious, but sometimes we feel outside pressure to set goals that go against the core of who we are. The pressure could be social, professional, whatever. But you need to resist the temptation to gear your performance for others, especially if it somehow goes against your values.

24:03Finally, you need goals that align among themselves. They must harmonize as a whole. Setting multiple conflicting goals will only create friction and frustration. If we're working against ourselves, we'll experience more heartburn than progress. That goes for setting too many goals in general. At the start of his memoir, The To-Do List, journalist Mike Gale has a moment of reflection. It's his 36th birthday, and he's plagued by all the things he has yet to accomplish with his life. So he sets some goals. 1 ,277 to be exact. Out of that list, he achieves 1 ,269. But the comedy of the story is the craziness his wife has to endure in the process.

24:44As far as I'm concerned, reading a farce is far better than a living one. Instead, I recommend you limit yourself to eight annual goals that align with your life, your values, and your ambitions. That way you can pursue as many as two per quarter, or get a few out of the way while you work on a major goal that requires more than one quarter. Goals of your own. To summarize, smarter goals are specific, measurable, actionable, risky, time-bound, exciting, and relevant. And now you're ready to start designing some of your own. How do you get started? I recommend you begin by pulling up your list of aspirations in your life score assessment.