Recently I listened to a podcast on Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income interviewing Michael Hyatt. Michael Hyatt is a best selling author and a writer who also helps people figure out how to be successful. The podcast was about goal setting (for the new year – 2017) and in it Michael mentions how in order to move the needle in the direction of success you have to get out of your comfort zone (sound familiar?) and set goals that are just beyond your reach in order for you to try to hit them and make progress.
He says that there are three zones – your comfort zone where you are good at what you do, familiar with the things you know, and you’re aware of it. Then there’s the discomfort zone – where all the growth and good stuff happen. And then he says there’s the delusion zone – a place where the goal is sooo far out of reach or unrealistic that you’re basically setting yourself up for failure. He advises that you avoid this third zone because this is where a lot of wheel spinning happen and frustrations and demotivating results are born.
Pat Flynn then asks a question that I thought was interesting. He asks that some people advocate actually setting your goals and aspirations in that delusion zone on purpose, basically set them as high as you want and dream about because even if you fail, on the way you’ll have achieved some amazing things. Michael Hyatt’s advice on that is actually quite interesting and I think wise. He says to look at not just the gap between where you are and where you want to be, but to also look at where you were and where you are now. The important thing here is to note and appreciate how far you’ve come without losing sight of how far you still need to go.
Very good advice, and overall, an excellent way to strive and reach for the stars without going insane in the process.
I’d like to add my own 2 cents here.
I say, phase gate your goals. It’s something I learned in project management (some of the stuff I do at my day job) but the idea is simple: when you have some big giant end goal in mind, it’s hard to wrap your brain around it and figure out how to get there. Learning to look at the progress made as well as the gap remaining is all great stuff and definitely something you should do when you review and evaluate the work that’s been done, or some alotted the time period has passed. But here’s my objection to just relying on remembering to appreciate your progress. If you set yourself a very high bar and you don’t pass it, there’s an emotional factor that can prevent you from really appreciating how far you’ve come.
So here’s where I’m adding my 2 cents. I want to stack my deck so I don’t have to remember to measure the progress made. I think that the better thing to do is setup smaller milestones, each one by itself a goal that’s not too overwhelming, and measure yourself once you reach each milestone. Each of these milestones are something that you can definitely achieve, but they are also stepping stones to your overall larger goal.
It’s kind of like running a race. I hate running, and I definitely don’t like running long races. But I get get myself to run in small increments. So I play mental games when I run thinking “just to the next tree” or “just up to the next traffic light”. I can deal with that, and before you know it, I’ve run an entire half marathon.
This isn’t breathtakingly new. And the concept of breaking a big goal down is well known in project management circles as a work breakdown structure. You take a crazy gigantic goal (like build the Hoover Dam) and break that down into as small chunks as possible. And in many ways I’m sure at our work many of us do this all the time. But I’m also sure (becuase I am guilty of this sometimes) that many of us also forget to do this in our private or personal lives.
Well, we all have goals in our lives, something inspired by our obsessions or something that we’re passionate about. We have all this motivation in the beginning and can’t wait to get started, but then we look at the actual end state and often we don’t know exactly how we should go about achieving it. We then get overwhelmed and then lose steam and all that momentum is lost. I think the people who are successful in the world are the ones who get all fired up about something, but instead of just marching out to “just do it” they’re the ones who buckle down and map the course out. They’re the ones who take the time to figure out where those achievable and effecting milestones are and map the route. Only then do they march out, because by then, they’ll know what they’re doing and how to get to where they want to go.