This week I sat down to set goals for the new year. After reading a few people’s year-in-review posts, I realized that while I have and re-read daily my long-term mission and visions, I have not set annual goals in a very long time. So, I sat down to come up with a few performance goals and some of the process goals I needed to hit to make those performance goals a reality.
The problem with a lot of the goals I have set in the past is that I either set them too low or I have absolutely no idea what number to hit.
So, I decided to create a scale of success from poor to audacious for every goal I wanted to hit.
I broke down each goal as follows:
- Poor – I would be disappointed with this outcome.
- Expected – If I did things exactly as I’ve always done them, this is the outcome I would expect.
- Good – I would be happy with the hard work I put into achieving this outcome.
- Audacious – If you told me this is where I would be next year, I would be shocked by the outcome.
When you set higher goals, you work harder and smarter to reach them.
For example, I have a new book coming out in October/November 2018. Here is how I would define the scale of success for copies sold by the end of the year. So in the firs 2-3 months:
- Poor: 2,000 copies
- Expected: 2,500 copies
- Good: 5,000 copies
- Audacious: 10,000 copies
As I looked at the goals in every category, I realized that achieving the audacious goals in each category would take me in all kinds of different directions. So, I decided to pick one audacious goal, two good goals, and one expected goal for the year. The audacious goal that I picked is likely going overflow into the other goals, which is why it makes the most sense to focus there. This may be a topic for another post.
