Setting Goals Is Sabotaging Your Success. Here’s What You Should Do Instead.

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”

— Lao Tzu

Part 1: Why setting goals is sabotaging your success

As any goal-setting guru will tell you, good goals have the following two characteristics:

1. They are measurable. You can tell objectively whether it was met or not met. “I am going to lose 30 pounds.”
2. They are time-boxed. There’s a deadline, and if you miss it, you failed. “I am going to lose 30 pounds in 60 days.”

But unfortunately, the world is not under your direct control. You can control your level of effort, but you cannot control your outcome. Many people had financial goals for 2020, but COVID-19 threw those people off their goals indefinitely. No amount of effort can overcome that.

The problem arises when we stake our self-worth on setting and achieving goals.

Since we can’t control the randomness of the world, there will inevitably be goals for which we fall short. If we decide whether to feel proud of ourselves or not based on our ability to achieve goals, we’re going to interpret a failure to achieve a goal as a sign that we should feel ashamed, even if our failure to achieve that goal was completely out of our control.

There are people out there, right now, who feel ashamed of themselves for not meeting their 2020 financial goals, even though an economic disaster has ravaged the world.

This weakness of goal setting makes you fragile. You’re dependent on the world to cut you a fair deal. If the world starts giving you bad breaks, your self-worth plummets. You grow weak at the knees, unsure of yourself. You stop taking risks. And as a result, you stop seeing success altogether.

There’s something you can do instead of setting goals that will keep you strong even when times are tough.

Part 2: What you should do instead of setting goals

It stands to reason that the only sensible way to judge whether we should feel proud of ourselves or not should be based only on things that are within our direct control.

We can’t control the world, but we can control our level of effort. So, instead of judging ourselves on whether we achieved an external status (a “goal”), we should judge ourselves on our efforts alone.

Here’s what that looks like in real life.

Instead of judging herself based on how many views or clicks she’s received, the aspiring writer should judge herself based on how many articles she’s published this week and how high-quality they were.

Instead of judging himself based on how many people purchased his product in the last month, the aspiring entrepreneur should judge himself based on how much work he’s put into the product in the first place.

Instead of judging themselves based on how many students pass their class (or rate their class highly on Rate My Professor), the newly-hired academic should judge themselves based on how thoroughly they teach and whether they are using effective teaching methods or not.

The point being, we should judge ourselves based on what we can control, not on what we cannot.

Part 3: How to put it into practice

Look at how you spend your time on a daily basis.

Do you do things that move you toward your goals for your life every day? Or do you tell yourself platitudes to excuse your lack of action?

As a writer, what moves me toward my goals is writing articles. Some days those articles do terribly, some days they do extremely well, but that’s not under my control. What’s under my control is whether I write articles or not. Therefore, I ought to feel proud of myself to the degree that I write articles.

Some days, I don’t do that. I get a lot of views and feel “excused” from having to write that day. But just because my views chart says many people are reading my work, doesn’t mean I should feel proud of myself. I should feel proud of myself when I do the work, not when the world decides to reward me for it.

Don’t wait until the world recognizes your work to feel proud of yourself. Feel proud of yourself now, even if nobody else will. Especially if nobody else will. When everyone else has given up because they weren’t getting the results they wanted, you’ll still be standing. And when you’re the last one on the field, you will get what you’ve earned.