This week’s question from our portal “Ask Us Anything” comes
I’ve heard you say that the point of a goal isn’t to achieve something, so much as it is to give you direction in life.
We’re going to have our best January ever in business. But at the same, we’re falling short of the monthly revenue goal I set for the year. Sometimes I feel positive about this; sometimes I feel negative. Do you have any guidance? How can I use that idea of moving in the right direction, as fuel, rather than saying, “We’re failing because we still didn’t reach our goal”?
Great question! This has to do with “destination thinking.”
When we were kids growing up, most of us were raised with the idea of getting to a certain destination. It’s almost embedded in our culture:
If I can just to get to summer, I’ll be OFF school, and it will be fun.
If I can just turn 18, I’ll be free.
If I can just get hired at that job, I’ll be successful.
If I can just make more money, I’ll be happy.
If I can just get to the weekend, everything will be great.
If I can just make it to retirement, then I’ll have have safety and security.
We start believing that once we arrive at a certain point, THEN we’ll be safe, secure, happy, successful, etc.
That’s what I call “destination thinking.”
This kind of thinking causes us to believe that when we hit a goal, it will make us good, smart, successful, etc. That’s simply not true—it’s a fallacy.
Goals are always long-term in the sense that we’re getting a more superior vision for ourselves.
A goal is like the “highway” we’re using to get to that vision. As long as we travel along that highway, there will be different on-ramps, off-ramps, mistakes, and potholes. We must navigate those, and as we do so, we become stronger and better at whatever we’re doing—so that ultimately we get to the vision.
When you set a goal for the first time, it’s very rare that you’ll reach it on the first try. That’s like a crapshoot. It takes so much information just to even figure out, “What do I need to DO to hit this goal?” Often a goal must be reset several times before a person actually accomplishes it.
The intelligent thing to do here is to see that adjustments must be made to hit your goal.
For most of humanity, when people don’t reach their goal, they give up. They don’t understand how to autocorrect to hit the goal. Their first thought is, “If I don’t hit this goal, I’m a failure.” That’s literally what they believe.
We also got a lot of reinforcement in that idea at school. If you didn’t get your homework done on time, if you didn’t write the essay well, if you didn’t pass the test—you failed.
But in real life, that’s not a failure at all. It’s actually the only way that we can experience any kind of new growth.
So, as long as you’re moving in the right direction towards your goal, and course-correcting along the way, you’ll get closer and closer to reaching it.
David
