Okay, fine, I’ll set a goal

Is the goal to reach the summit or to enjoy the view? (Image by Muhammad Rohan Hussain)

At one point, I set a goal to have 500 students at my music school. We didn’t hit it.

Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t hit it. That sounds like too many students to manage. The goal was divorced from its context and the necessary infrastructure to support achieving it. It was arbitrary.

I know that lots of people are motivated by big goals like that. If the goal is designed to be too ambitious to reach, it pumps them up and they end up achieving more than they otherwise would have.

That’s not me. A massive goal doesn’t inspire me. It feels like a wish or a fantasy, unreachable. I’m like a fly that keeps buzzing against a windowpane. I can see the other side, but I have no way to break through the glass and no understanding of how to get around it to the world beyond.

Lately, however, I’ve been rethinking my attitude about goals. What could be possible if I were to try to achieve something I truly wanted to achieve, believing that I was capable of doing what was necessary to achieve it?

An acquaintance shared how a giant medical debt was the impetus for launching and intensely pursuing a new business. His goal of clearing the debt was tightly linked to a series of actions that were designed to accomplish just that, as quickly as possible. No wonder he was able to do it.

My goal of 500 students was arbitrary because it was not tied to action. I had hoped that setting the goal would give me clarity about what actions my team and I could take to achieve it, but that’s not what happened.

In fact, my music school is unlikely to grow unless we can identify at least one mechanism of growth and deploy it with intention. And that is not going to happen unless and until I have a strong motivation to make that growth happen — which, as of today, I don’t.

On the other hand, I’m thinking about launching a new business. I have a specific revenue target in mind that is, in turn, directly tied to a personal financial target. In other words, I have a goal of making a certain dollar amount for a specific, meaningful reason. Could the promise of reaching this goal inspire me to get this new business off the ground?

I think that’s how it’s supposed to work. But in the past, I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t build the consistent habits that would allow me to succeed — I didn’t even know what habits to build. And I definitely didn’t compress those habits into a tight timeline that kept me pushing hard until the end. There was no end in sight, so any enthusiasm I began with quickly waned.

Today, I know that the way to succeed would be to determine the things I have control over that I can do to lead toward the achievement of the goal, build a system for doing them, and then do them.

It seems so simple, but I understand why it eluded me for so long: I couldn’t see how what I did made any difference. Resolving that is the key to ensuring that a goal isn’t just a stimulus for magical thinking.

More broadly, I see now that setting goals is the key to ensuring that my entire life turns out the way I want it to, rather than being built upon a vague hope (more magical thinking). If the goals are connected to things that matter to me, they won’t be arbitrary.

So, okay, fine — I’ll set a goal. And maybe I’ll even achieve it, knowing what I know now. I’ll keep you posted.