The pot of gold or the ATM?

Having never found a four-leaf clover, I gave up looking. I have other sources of luck now. (Image by Allie M)

When it comes to goals, there’s a paradox. I’m pretty sure it was Ariana who pointed it out.

How do we plug away toward a desired outcome without being attached to the outcome?

Are we to accept that the outcome is something that will be perpetually out of reach, meaning that the best we can do is enjoy the journey and see how close we get?

Or do we choose something reliably in our control and undertake the necessary steps, fully expecting to get achieve what we set out to do?

Some people resolve this by never having goals. That was me for a long time.

However, in the past few years I’ve discovered that there are two types of goals (maybe there are more, but I just want to talk about two of them right now).

One type of goal is meant to be aspirational. It’s based on the astronomically incorrect “shoot for the moon, land among the stars” philosophy. It’s more specific and clear than a vision, but it’s ultimately out of your hands whether you will reach it.

An example would be a company that does about $250K in revenue saying, “We will earn a million in revenue next year.” Such a company probably doesn’t have the infrastructure to quadruple its revenue — it will have to build it. It’s not impossible, but the point of this type of goal — what Jim Collins calls a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, or BHAG — isn’t about fully achieving it, necessarily. It’s meant to motivate and inspire everyone at the company to shift their thinking and actions into alignment with the desired outcome. That’s what Kennedy did with his assertion that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

The second type of goal is more practical and concrete. It’s meant to be distinctly achievable, based on actions that are already known. For example, an acquaintance of mine, Mark, had a goal of creating and posting 365 videos in 365 days last year, and he recently summited that particular mountain.

While a lengthy hospital stay or some other incapacitating event might have prevented Mark from being able to follow through on his goal, he could otherwise expect that if he carried out the requisite actions, he would get those 365 videos shipped.

I’m a fan of the practical goal over the aspirational goal. I’d rather visit the ATM, so to speak, than go on a quest for a pot of gold.

That said, I’m beginning to see how a bridge can be built between the two kinds of goals. It’s based on making assertions about what certain actions might yield beyond their direct results. These second-order effects can potentially get us a lot closer to our BHAG. Over time, we can reasonably count on them.

To explore this, let’s go back to the $250K company. Suppose that company, over a period of six months, determined that every $1,000 spent on ads nets $10K in sales (wouldn’t that be nice).

Now, all the company can truly control is placing their ads — they can’t control who clicks on them or who buys. But based on the data, if they were to increase their ad spend from $25K to $100K, they’d theoretically hit a million dollars in revenue. Easy peasy!

This company might need to change its operations in order to fulfill the greater demand. It might find that “ad fatigue” sets in and their ads stop working as effectively at a certain point. Real life is more complicated than models. But the point is that the company might already have identified the mechanism by which it can achieve their big goal, making it less hairy and audacious.

So how does attachment to the outcome fit in? Well, for an aspirational goal, the outcome is our North Star, helping us navigate and giving us something to aim toward. The point of it is how it changes our actions, not necessarily the attainment of it. Along those lines, you could argue that the moon landing itself was not important; the benefit of Kennedy’s grand pronouncement was in the technological innovations spurred by the space program and the display of American dominance in the midst of the Cold War.

For a practical goal, our job is to focus on the actions we intend to take and not on their outcome. For Mark, the guy who made the 365 videos last year, his attachment to the long-term outcome was critical for ensuring that he would follow through. Essentially, he created a game and committed to playing by its rules. However, he had to let go of attachment to the performance of any one video. His job was just to make the next one.

At some point, no matter what kind of goal we have set, we can evaluate our results and adjust course. We can decide we don’t want to continue. We can double down on something that appears to be working. Either way, when we understand the purpose behind the goal and the context of it, we can make better decisions and avoid frustration. We can let go of the irrelevant, focus on what matters most to us, and find more meaning in our work.