Why Successful People Take the Fun Out of Their Goals
Fun goals are for dreamers. Fun goals like becoming a millionaire or making an Olympic team look good on paper and are fun to talk about. However, the goal of a goal is not to look good on paper and have fun talking about it. The goal of a goal is to drive action.
Fun goals are vague when it comes to action. What’s the first, second, and third action you must take on the path to a fun goal like becoming a millionaire? Unquestionably, there are probably more than 1000 different ways you could go about achieving the status of a millionaire. When knowing what to do next is this vague, measuring progress is also vague.
Because of this, successful people create boring goals, not fun goals. Boring goals are goals to stay consistent with routines and holding oneself accountable to the process of achieving a fun goal.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to have fun goals to dream about for motivation. Fun goals are great tools for helping provide direction, or what I like to call a goal compass. So, it can be beneficial to have a few fun goals in addition to your boring goals. However, fun goals in a vacuum are worthless. As a result, once you set your compass with a fun goal, the process to get to the destination becomes the most important part of the goal setting. This process is defining and executing the pursuit of your boring goals.
What’s more, the anatomy of a good boring goal is a combination of the following three characteristics:
- Repeatable: you can do as a routine either daily, weekly, or something in between
- Measurable: you can track with precise numbers that lead to a visual representation of progress over time.
- Systematic: it intertwines with an overall system of proven processes that create synergy.
The fact is, while celebrating success is fun, doing what it takes to be successful is often boring. Don’t confuse these two things. There is plenty of research that proves this as a fact. Author Geoff Colvin writes this in so many words in his seminal book Talent is Overrated:
It seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and they would not distinguish the best from the rest.