What Super Mario can teach us about goal setting

Last week I wrote a blog titled “Why Goal Setting is Overrated”. If you missed it, get caught up here so you will know the context of what I’m about to share with you. The blog today is from my personal journal and things that randomly pop into my mind while running.

The goal is to help break down last weeks blog into practical steps to focus on inputs rather than spend a ton of time thinking and talking about “the big goal”.

Enjoy!

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Journal Entry - Aug 2020

We recently took a weeklong vacation in South Haven Michigan to enjoy time together as a family. If you’re from Michigan or anywhere close, I highly recommend the area. It’s clean, has great food and shopping, and the beaches are awesome! It’s really a beautiful community at the southwest part of Michigan that draws Chicagoans, people from Indiana, and even license plates from Missouri.

Beyond relaxing, I made it a point to continue focusing on improving my short distance run time and getting some fitness in. Nothing fancy, but some 3 to 6 mile runs mixed with a few body weight exercises. The best part of it is that I get to explore a new area and see new sights I wouldn’t see hanging at the beach.

As I was running though, I remembered the game Super Mario. And I’m talking original Nintendo days, not the current tech. My video game days ended at Nintendo 64 which is like 20 years ago…yikes!

But for those of you that played the game, remember the gold coins? That you needed to move Mario forward, jump over obstacles, and smash the enemy and when you did, you had the opportunity to collect gold coins. The cool thing about the gold coins is they were relatively frequent and every time you collected one, the system would make a little jingle sound and show you how many gold coins you had. It was pretty gratifying. According to Mariowiki.com, “Gold Coins are the main currency of the Mushroom Kingdom. They can be collected in most Mario games. They have varying effects depending on the game type: in platformer games, they increase a player’s score and grant extra lives; in racing games, they increase speed and recovery times; and in RPGs, they can be used to purchase items, all among other uses.” So the gold coins have value, so what does that mean for goal setting?

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The excerpt ends with a question and one that I believe can really help clarify what wins look like in terms of goal setting. The coins are the short term wins. The coins represent the satisfaction with the “next step”. In running, it’s celebrating when your watch hits another mile instead of focusing on the 6 you want to do.

There’s also psychological research that shows the short term win or “coin” helps with keeping people coming back for more. The small dopamine hit when a post is “liked” on Facebook would be the same equivalent. So how do we get more of the same mental wins in regards to goal setting, the same coins that Mario achieved before moving on to the next level?

Focus on the input rather than the output.

It’s all in the setup. I can’t stress this more, but please do yourself a huge favor and purchase Atomic Habits by James Clear. He has much greater strategies and tips to take this thought to the next level.

Here’s some tips of mine that will help you achieve some more mental gold coins throughout the day and help you build the life you want:

• If you want to exercise daily (the output), then focus on small inputs first. Layout your shoes and clothes right next to your bed so you get that mental trigger right away. Don’t focus on the workout, focus on putting the clothes on and lacing the shoes.

• If you want to blog, your input could be a simple way to capture your ideas. Whether it’s your iphone or a notebook, write down and sketch out a title and small paragraph of the idea. Instead of focusing on the big goal “I want to write 100 blogs this year”, dedicate your mind to “I will write a blog on Monday and Wednesday every week”. That’s it. Not 100, but 2.

• If you want to have a better relationship, the input would be to say something kind or do something next just once per week instead of focusing on some ambiguous picture of “better”. For an anniversary date one year, my wife and I went to visit a couple who was married for 60+ years and asked them: “What was your secret to success”? Their answers were so simple: “Don’t go to bed angry.” That’s it! It wasn’t some off the chart “BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)”, it was a simple input – I chose to resolve my conflicts and go to bed in peace. Bam.

• If you want to save $10,000 to buy a new car, what’s the point of thinking about the $10,000? Who does that anyway? The input is “monthly I chose to save $300 so that in a few years I can buy my car”.

• If you’re frustrated with the morning routine because breakfast takes too long to prep and get out the door, then the input is a simple systems focus rather than “I hate my mornings”. The input could be overnight oats (I hate cold oatmeal so I stopped this one, but you might!), Sunday meal prep, or simply having your ingredients lined up for a quick prep.

Inputs!

• In business, it’s easy to say “We want to deliver great customer service”. Sure. Every company does. But what is the input? The input could be something as small as picking the phone up after only 2 rings, smiling while you’re talking, and saying words like “thank you” and “please”. Very simple input that leads to extraordinary outputs.

• If you want to improve your technology platform, relying on “big moves that lead to big improvements” is a waste of time. Often, those ideas soak up tremendous amounts of time in meetings and brainstorming sessions v optimizing the details. One simple improvement of reducing a few clicks so your team can do a single task quicker. Another input is changing a display so your team can have the data they need quicker v digging around for it. We have a tendency to want to go big or go home but it’s a series of small improvements over time that lead to the greatest results.

• If you want to improve your sales which is often a financial metric, staring at the financial metric won’t do you any good. Decide on the inputs. “I will make 50 calls a week, I will send 200 LinkedIn requests a week, I will post 1 article and 3 posts per week on LinkedIN”, then work the plan. Focus on the inputs rather than on the outcome of more money. It’s alot more fun and much less stressful!

I can give you hundreds of practical examples but I believe you’re smart and you will figure it out. Take your desired outcome and reverse engineer it. What small adjustments to the system can you make, your daily checklist or your exercise routine? Your savings and budgeting plan?

Devote yourself to systems development and watch your world change.

Next time we will talk about a really important item and that’s tracking progress.

Stay tuned and Merry Christmas!