How To Set Goals That Actually Matter

You would find no less than a thousand blog posts that cover the importance of setting goals. Those of us that are the driven and motivated type practically grew up on goal setting. Whether it was to make the varsity football team years ago, or graduate with a 3.5 GPA, or get that promotion you’ve been after. Goals help us with our pursuit of accomplishment. In a way, we couldn’t accomplish much without them. Goals drive our behavior and set priorities that ultimately determine what behavioral actions we take on a daily basis. They are more or less mandatory if you desire accomplishment.

When setting out to start a business, this is one of the foundational things all entrepreneurs do immediately – set goals. They set goals for every single aspect of their business from getting customer feedback, to timelines of the first product release, revenue figures in month X, breakeven in month Y, and so on. All of which are inherently good! Trouble is, when we operate on a goal by goal basis without connecting the dots in between, we’re left with a list of checked boxes claiming accomplishment, but lack the synergy to propel the business forward. Likewise in our careers.

I’m speaking from experience here through multiple circumstances, even continued “goals” mistakes I keep making. But, for example, this exact situation occurred to a startup I was working on. Our service relies on customers and vendors, and we can’t have one without the other. We were obviously aware of this situation, but being the go-getters that we are, we went goal-crazy, setting figures for number of customers by the end of each month. Same drama on our vendor side – onboarding 10 new accounts in May seemed like a good goal, and into our shared Evernote folder it would go. We had some specific goals, in the form of vendors we wanted to recruit. Disappointment ensued.

Not that we failed in our goals per se. Sometimes we would hit them; quite often, actually. But, rarely did accomplishing the goal itself lend us a pearl of wisdom to move on with the next phase of our growth. Early on, we had landed a test opportunity with one of our “target clients”. We were ecstatic, and couldn’t wait to get to work with them. We were 10 miles ahead, already planning what could come after we nailed this first project. I’m sure you can predict what happened next. None of our dreams materialized. It went okay, but just okay. We learned a lot from it and made a good relationship with them. While all was not lost, we were truly disappointed. We had envisioned it going differently and spent a lot of time trying to ensure it did. Following the project, here we sat, goal accomplished, we landed the client and ran a project with them, like we set out to do. And so what?

Half the battle in reaching goals is setting the right goals. I admit, having a Hail Mary client on our list so early on in our startup may not have been the best goal. It probably wasn’t specific enough. Goals are ultra-important, and they’ll never stop being important. Set the right goals, but more importantly, set regular actions towards those goals. We have so much unknown, so much that we just can’t plan for or control, we are to an extent, at the mercy of our given marketplace or industry. However, we can control what we expend our energy on, and that needs to be the most important. Set goals based on the results of the actionable priorities you are engaged with. Those bigger milestone goals will become clearer with time.

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