If want to be accomplish anything spectacular in life, you need to stop creating useless “feel-good” goals and start creating measurable goals that facilitate a process.
Every so often, my wonderful gym (Lifetime Fitness) sponsors various fitness challenges. With these challenges, participants post their fitness goals on a sheet a paper and post them on the gym’s wall, for all to see.
Here are a few random pictures that I snapped:
Do you see any problem in these “goals”?
If I had to guess how many of these participants actually accomplished their goal, I’d say NONE.
Why?
I call these types of goals “useless goals” which serve not to create change, but to create a temporary “feel-good” moment. They are solitary events (not apart of a larger process) designed to give the goal-setter a fleeting feeling of accomplishment.
“I’m doing something!” or “I’ve made a decision!” the goal-setter assuages.
For these goals to have any power and actually initiate a long-term process that produces actual results, they need to be measurable and quantifiable.
“Lose weight” and “Get Ripped” are ambiguous — unmeasurable and unquantified — it screams EVENT, not PROCESS. When does “lose weight” become a goal accomplished? 12 ounces in water weight? 1 pound? 10?
For your goals to be attacked AND be apart of a larger process, you need to quantify them with numbers and start with achievable goals that can be stair-stepped higher and higher.
A great example is my very own book, The Millionaire Fastlane. My very first goal with this book was simply to sell 100 copies. Yup, just 100; a small, quantifiable goal! After 100, the goal moved to 500. Then 1,000. Then 5,000. Then 10,000. Onward and up!
With each goal I achieve, I am reinforced with a feeling of accomplishment and it makes it easier to continue the process forward. With each stair-step up, I define a process to get there. Had my goal been to “sell books” how could I actually measure success or failure? How can I define a process to make it happen?
And finally, which each step of the goal obtained, reward yourself! Smoke a cigar! Take a weekend trip to the coast! Splurge on a fancy meal. Don’t be afraid to reward yourself for your own accomplishments.
If these people were serious about their fitness goals, they would have read like this:
“Lose weight” would have been “lose 35 pounds in 90 days and fit in size 36 jeans”
and
“Get ripped” would have been “reduce my bodyfat from 20% to 12% in 90 days“.
But it doesn’t end there.
Each of these “end goals” need to be replaced with short-term, achievable goals. Before you can lose 50 pounds, you first have to lose 5! That is how you start a process.
Ever see this mentality on business forums? People want to enthusiastically learn how to make one-million dollars and yet they don’t even know how to make one-hundred dollars, as if the process can be skipped over — nope, head right on over to the event! Before I made a million, I first had to learn how to make a hundred!
So to improve your chances of reaching your goals through a process-oriented campaign, here is what you do:
(1) Have a goal defined and written down — not on the computer — on paper.
(2) Have this goal clearly measurable and quantified.
(3) Break down those goals into stair-steps; easily accomplished goals verified by mathematics.
(4) Define a process (action steps) with each stair-step.
(5) Reward yourself for each step along the journey.
Goals are great but they’re useless if they aren’t measurable and quantified. Don’t fall for the trap of making ambiguous goals that do nothing but make you feel good in the 20 seconds it took you to make them. Define them specifically with numbers and then break them apart into tiny segments. Dive into the process of accomplishment by attacking your goals one mathematical piece at a time.
What goal facilitating processes have you had success with?
~ MJ
PS: For those of you looking to attack a fitness goal, my friend recently started LeanStrongBody.com — a program specifically for busy entrepreneurs! Check it out!
And Stop The Prostitution of Monday Through Friday!
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