The Good News and the Bad News About Setting Goals
Goal setting is a fundamental part of success. They give you direction, discipline, and motivation. However, the older you get the more you realize that goal setting can sometime be just as disappointing as it is motivating. Sometimes your discipline fades, and you start going the wrong direction.
As time passes and you look back on the many goals you have set, you begin to recognize that you won’t reach all your goals. This is the bad news about goal setting. Just because you set a goal does not mean you will be successful in achieving that goal.
However, while there is never a guarantee of success in pursuing a goal, there are ways to guarantee progress. This is the good news.
Without progress, your chance of reaching any goal is essentially zero in all but the most obscure cases. On the other hand, each time you make a little progress you also increase your chance at success. As a result, the best way to guarantee your goal setting process will not go to waste is to set goals using a goal progression.
A goal progression is the process of starting easy then gradually increasing the challenge. For example, it’s just not possible to go from sedentary to running a qualifying time for the Boston Marathon overnight. As a result, the goal pursuit plan for running in the Boston Marathon must incorporate a progressive running plan that gradually increases the running distance and speed over multiple months.
This is clearly not rocket science. But unfortunately, it’s easy to overestimate what you can do in a day and underestimate what you can do in a lifetime. Therefore, when you are setting goals it’s necessary to always remind yourself to not plan for the overnight success story. If it happens, great. However, it’s better to plan for the process of making steady progress. Then having the patience to stick with that process for the long run.