Not long ago, I was listening to a podcast about goal setting. It brought up an idea that I found interesting and made an interesting case for it. To be honest, it goes against what I’ve done in the past but I see the argument in favor of it.
The idea is that goals should be set so you can achieve them at least 80% of the time. Essentially, don’t chase incredibly tough goals. Instead, set yourself up for success most of the time but sometimes challenge yourself with a tough goal.
This kind of goes against what I’ve always done, which was set very challenging goals and acknowledge that, even if you fall short, you’ve still accomplished a lot.
The argument in favor of this is that successes can build upon each other. By setting a series of goals that will most likely be accomplished, you’re stacking successes on top of each other. By doing this, you’re building confidence to keep pushing forward toward the next goal and motivation to reach for it. Sure, occasionally you’ll come up a little short. However, if you’re getting far more successes than failures, the confidence and motivation will be there.
Meanwhile, if you set hard goals that you will frequently fall short of, it can be difficult to consider even big accomplishments as successes if you fell short of the goal. This can potentially be very demoralizing and cause a loss of confidence and motivation if you’re consistently falling short of the goal.
So I’ll change my stance on goal setting. While having an occasional big and audacious goal out there can be a good thing, set a series of smaller and much more incremental goals to lead your way there. Make the goals challenging but clearly attainable. Set them so you will more likely than not succeed as long as you do the work that you know you are capable of doing.