Why Goal Setting is Overrated

For the past several years my mind has been changing in the area of goal-setting. It has been an area of unrest and unsettling. There are thousands of courses, coaches, and ideas on goal setting which has an initial motivating burst of energy, until the real work begins. The lingering question of “Is there a better way?” has been simmering in the crockpot of my mind for several years and I believe there’s a solution in place to take action on that requires a paradigm shift in what we value in the process of goal setting v goal setting as an objective itself. 

Since we are nearing the end of one of the craziest years of our lives, I’m noticing more content being driven with a focus of 2021 planning and goal setting. With the way this year has gone, I believe many of us want to put 2020 behind us and refocus for brighter days ahead.  A recent post on LinkedIn that caught my attention had a headline of “Goal Setting on Steroids.” I’m sure the content is good and valuable, but the headline speaks to me about the fundamental outcomes driven mentality we have. The “goal” is often the focal point of thought and conversation. To be clear, it’s not that I think goal setting is a bad idea because having a target is important. When I go deer hunting, only after careful preparation of shooting and dialing in my scope is when I shoot at a specific spot of the animal. The target is the buck, yet I don’t aim at his back leg. I aim at the vitals. Having a target is a good idea. 

However, the process in which many of us take in achieving various goals in my belief, lacks focus, specificity, and order. Much of the time is spent thinking about the end goal, crossing the finish line, and what success looks like. There are also some schools of thought that have you meditate or envision the future and by doing that it will help you actually achieve the outcome.  

 

Said differently: Vision (output) is overrated, execution (input) is underrated.  Outputs are overrated, inputs are underrated.

 

Longtime management expert Peter Drucker coined the phrase: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” While I believe that his thought is mainly true, I also believe that there’s a second part to that phrase that is worded more in a coding if/then mindset. It goes: If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then the overall process enables you to have a culture to begin with.

 

You cannot have a culture if the business or organization simply doesn’t work. If there’s no customers to serve there’s no people to pay. If there’s no customers to delight, there’s no deadlines to meet. It starts with the input.

 

Here’s a short list why I believe goal setting in its current form is actually incredibly ineffective because of the emphasis on the outcome and not the process –

• Current goal setting methods place a greater focus on the end result, talking about it, strategizing about it without moving into the granular details of “how”

• Too much mindshare is wasted by formulating what the end result should be when the end result lacks data and experience to even formulate a precise determination

• High emphasis on ideas, little emphasis on the systems and processes that enable the outcome to happen

• Biased focus on the destination (the why), ignorance or incompetence on the roadmap (the how)

• Outcomes are determined buy inputs, not the other way around

The list is a bit random, but you probably get the point. It’s the same idea that instead of doing the push ups, situps, and squats you spend more time researching the weight loss and searching for the perfect yoga pants. Instead of writing the blog and getting practice in the “doing” you spend time researching how others are doing it. Instead of making the sales calls, reach outs, and connect requests, you spend time reading about how to do it. 

 

There’s nothing wrong with preparation but we spend an excessive amount of time strategizing and visioneering and not dialing in the scope. We don’t take the time to actually layout what the possible inputs are to achieve the outcome we desire. This requires a bit of experimentation, action, and data gathering so more incremental change can happen to directly map to the outcomes.

 

For me, this journey started several years ago with reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and learning about the habit loop which consists of cue, routine, and reward. As someone who enjoys goal setting and achievement, this idea started the process of a better way of looking at how goals are actually achieved.

 

Then in 2020 I read Atomic Habits by James Clear and it stuck. The way in which James wrote his book turned up the heat on my thinking of an input focused mindset. I highly, highly recommend this book. James says that “We need to optimize for the starting line, not the finish line.” Inputs drive outputs. If you eat fast food consistently, you can make an educated guess on what your outcome will be. If you have an end goal of writing a book, focus on the daily inputs of writing a minimum of 500 words per day. Place a greater emphasis on the daily input rather than the thought of “I want to write a book.”

 

My goal in sharing this idea with you is to help you avoid discouragement. Goals are awesome, but the input is greater. If you want to pay off your house early, then your monthly “extra” is the input. If you want to become stronger physically, it’s not about the goal of being stronger, it’s the process of the daily discipline of doing the push-ups even when you don’t “feel” like it. Yes, go through the motions.

Here’s a personal regret of 2020 – I didn’t write one blog post per week. Look at it for yourself. I petered off around April. What I said to myself and my community is that “I was too busy.” So in a week where you have 10,080 minutes “I didn’t have time” to take 60 of those minutes to write. That’s about a half a percent. What an excuse! How many minutes spent on social media, mindless scrolling, and watching the drama we all see on the political news networks. One of the greatest keys of self-awareness is being honest with yourself. How gratifying would it have been to look back at 52 weeks of highly valuable content which helped others grow! Onward.

So what does all this mean for change? For starters, we are changing what we focus our mind and efforts on. In business, our strategic meetings will be more of a reconciliation of tactical wins and opportunity and trend assessments rather than more brainstorming. We will focus on building the flywheel brick-by-brick of the input driven items that may yield the greatest incremental results. The ones that don’t, we will eliminate. Same goes for our home life. We will take the same input focused approach and focus our effort on the daily and weekly 1% incremental changes and have extreme patience on the momentum building. If the outcome is a marathon in fall of 2021, then the input will be the daily runs, nutrition adjustments, and making sure shoes and shorts are by the bed every morning. 

I encourage you to take a hard and honest look at your “goals”. Has the conversation and thinking been around what you want or discouragement about not achieving it? 

Shift your thinking into the incremental inputs. 

I believe more than ever we should be concerned about trajectory, where we will end up based on daily actions. 

Write the blog, edit later. Create the website, optimize later. Start the business, improve it later. Take action. Value the small wins, the little inputs that are not making a big splash. Don’t look back at your life regretting what you didn’t do because you undervalued the input…which sounds alot like a dreaded four letter word – “work”. 

See ya 2020 and have a great, input focused 2021.