The power and peril of setting big goals
The right way and the wrong way
“What’s your Big Hairy Ass Goal?” That’s what we hear. The current culture is one of setting extreme goals that drive us to extreme execution and success. The implied logic is that unless your goals are outsized you are selling yourself short. Is that really the case? Is there a peril to setting unreasonable goals?
The answer is yes there is a peril in routinely setting unreasonable goals, but the answer is also yes there is power in setting big goals.
First let’s talk about the peril.
Let’s say you’re in sales. For the last 5 year’s you have had a $1million dollar sales quota. You’ve met or exceeded that quota more than half of the time. This year you get a new manager who believes in setting big goals. Your new manager says your quota is now $2 million.
You are a professional so you should rise to the challenge, right? Shouldn’t the $2 million goal be twice as challenging as the $1 million goal? Even if you only achieve 80% of the new $2 million goal you’ve made the company an extra $600K. That’s good right?
The problem with that logic is that it is entirely arbitrary. What makes us think $2M is any more achievable or possible than $1M? What’s going to happen? At the end of the year when you work your tail off and bring in $1.6M everyone is happy but you didn’t make your goal.
It’s dishonest. You’ve created a culture where everyone knows the goals are bullshit and failure becomes excusable, accepted and finally expected. Does that sound like a culture that will be best in class? Do you really want to burn-in an expectation of failure?
There is a way that this could work. If the $2M goal had some sort of specificity in the way it was set. If you worked through the hows and the whens. If you asked the question in a different way. “What would we need to do to make a $2M quota?” If the answer is “work harder” then you need to rethink your goals or your employment policies. The right answer should talk to resource and market constraints and investments to relieve them so that you can get to the goal.
The point is that if the $2M goal had some sort of logical plan to support it that you could buy into then, yeah, it might be a reasonable big goal, if that makes sense.
What’s a personal example? Maybe you give yourself a stretch goal of running a marathon or losing 80 pounds. It’s the same dynamic. Unless that goal has some specificity on how you’re going to get there it is setting you up to fail.
You risk getting caught in the same cycle of setting goals, achieving some or part of that goal, then having to set another goal, etc. It’s the same culture of expecting to fail. It can become poisonous to your growth. If you go into everything by setting an unrealistic goal with no supporting specificity you start believing the goal doesn’t mean anything. In reality you’re designing your life with the expectation of failure. That doesn’t seem very inviting, does it?
What makes the goal unrealistic is not the size of the goal. What makes the goal unrealistic is when you have no specific way or plan to get there. Trying hard is great. Working hard is necessary. But if the goal is unreasonable you are playing a rigged game. The deck is stacked against you.
The worst scenario is when you start to wrap your self-worth around an unrealistic goal. Now you’ve set yourself up to fail and invested yourself emotionally. When you do fail it causes a crisis of faith.
That’s a destructive scenario.
The tricky balance is to be emotionally committed, enough so to ‘own’ the goal and the results but to also retain enough emotional detachment to know that this goal is just another step in your life learning. To be ‘all-in’, to burn your boats but at the same time have a 3rd party perspective.
That’s one of the ways a good coach can help, whether personally or in business. They can give you that 3rd party perspective while you give it everything you have to achieve the goal.
One baseline driver when setting goals is your ‘why’. If you don’t care about your goal, setting a bigger goal typically won’t make you care more about it. That’s like the old joke “we lose money on the individual sales but make it up in volume!” The math doesn’t’ work.
On the positive side big hairy goals can change your life.
How does that work? What’s the dynamic?
The value in a bigger goal is that you can’t achieve it with existing tools and existing effort levels. The bigger goal forces you to grow by forcing you to find a different set of resources.
When I set a goal of qualifying for Boston it forced me to figure out how to take 40 minutes off of my finishing time. This led me to increase the volume and intensity of my training to a level I never thought possible. It broke my frame of reference and taught me new skills. In this way the big goal changed my life in a way that an incremental goal could not.
But if I had tried to qualify for Boston by nonspecifically ‘trying harder’ with the same training techniques I was using I would have failed. If I didn’t truly care about that goal, if I hadn’t internalized it, if it wasn’t important to me I would not have risen to that training level and I would have failed.
That’s the power of a big goal done right.
The big goal in itself is neither reasonable nor unreasonable. Does it motivate you to ask better questions and learn things? Does it set you on fire so that you freely make the resource investment that the big goal achievement requires?
If it doesn’t, then don’t bother. The big goal in itself does nothing. If you constantly set goals and miss them you create an attitude that accepts and expects failure. When you consider the big goal ask better questions. “What would it take to make this possible?”
Then commit, burn your boats and go for it, but always hold back a little of yourself in detachment so you don’t go crazy.