Welcome back to my third installment on using goals to create habits that transform your life. So far, I’ve covered the value in making the goals small so that it’s less painful to sit down and do them, and the value behind having an accountability partner to whom you’ve defined the goal, and then implementing some other kind of tracking that will allow you to look back and see what you’ve accomplished.
I a started out today having a very specific thing I wanted to cover, but we’ll see how well I stick to that.
My experience in the past has shown me that creating new habits that leads to some kind of trackable results that you believe — rightly or wrongly — will change your life can be very addicting. On the one hand, that’s really good. That very addicting nature means that once you get started it’s the natural tendency to keep at it. Even better, once you’ve had success with a few new habits, you become more likely to add even more habits.
I think that’s probably at least part of what is driving the life hacker craze (I use craze in the best possible way here), but that addictive nature means that you need to go into this kind of thing with your eyes wide open. Firstly, make sure that you have a clear understanding of what you’re odds are of accomplishing the thing that you’re setting out to do, and the relative benefits of achieving your goal.
If I set a goal to increase the amount of distance I can run without getting tired and out of breath, barring really unusual circumstances, I can say with a relatively high degree of certainty that over time I will accomplish that exact goal. If, on the other hand I set a goal to become a world-class marathoner, my odds of successfully achieving that particular goal are very, very small.
Getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, and gradually working up the amount of time I spend exercising — more particularly running — should really be all that would be involved for accomplishing the first goal. When it comes to the second goal; however, have to do all of that on and much, much larger scale. In fact, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the very top percentage of professional marathoners couldn’t put in enough hours training to remain in their peak condition if they were simultaneously trying to hold down a traditional 9-to-5 job.
That means that in order to become an elite marathoner, I would have to dedicate enough hours to training in order to reach the top levels of performance which are available to someone holding down a traditional job, then get sponsorships or some other kind of outside funding that would allow me to transition into running marathons as my full-time job. Nothing there is completely undoable yet, but there are genetic aspects of simply can’t be overcome by someone who didn’t when the genetic lottery.
Everyone loves a story about someone who refused to quit pursuing the dream, and as a consequence overcame tremendous odds or handicaps to achieve greatness, but as a society we tend not to look at the other side of that coin. For every person who set out to achieve some incredibly unlikely goal, and who ultimately succeeded, there are probably thousands or tens of thousands of people who put in very similar amounts of effort but who failed and were left with nothing but regrets, bitterness, and a lot of wasted time to show for their efforts.
Again, I think having goals is great, and that most people ere on the side of not setting big enough goals rather than on going after something that is too big into unlikely, but the problem is very real. It’s especially big when you talk about goals that revolve around making a living in entertainment. For every success story of an actor, or an author, or comedian who make it big there are a lot of people who don’t manage to ride the wave of luck and opportunity to becoming a superstar.
So, just be aware of the opportunity costs of what you’re giving up to pursue a particular goal versus both the payoff, and the relative odds of success. Deciding that you want to become an accountant as a way of changing careers is going to be a fair amount of work, but it doesn’t have to consume your entire life. In a similar vein, it’s not going to the to income in the tens of millions of dollars per year range, but if you are of at least average intelligence and are willing to put in the work — and possibly get a degree to backup the fact that you’ve learned what you need to learn – the odds that you’ll succeed are extremely high.
So, if I had to summarize that first point I would say it’s all about not setting goals that are so big and unlikely to result in success that you look back years later wishing that you hadn’t started on that path in the first place. I could probably stop the blog entry right there and the like I accomplished what I set out to accomplish, but it’s also worth mentioning that you can end up with the same kind of problem even if your goals are more reasonable.
You can fashion a whole bunch of really reasonable, high-value, likely to achieve goals — goals that you ultimately end up achieving — and still in the experience bitterly disappointed and unhappy once you realize that your goals didn’t actually move you towards the things that were most important to you. Make sure that as you are setting out your goals that they align with your core values, and that you are leaving time for the things in your life that either can’t be replaced, or that you don’t want to replace.
The thing that most immediately suggests itself as being in that category is your relationship with your family and your closest friends. Supporting those relationships shouldn’t mean that you have to spend dozens of hours a week at bars or doing things you actively hate to the detriment of goals that you know will help improve your quality of life, but you don’t want to fill your life up with a bunch of small things that cried out your ability to achieve the big things.
If it seems like I just gave conflicting advice, I suppose I did to some extent, but I really wasn’t trying to say don’t pick goals that are too big or goals that are too small. What I’m trying to say is make sure you’re picking the right goals and if you’re going to focus on something that’s really usage and really unlikely to result in success, make sure that you’re okay with what your life will look like if you don’t succeed at that goal.
That’s it for this week, I hope these posts are proving helpful or at least giving you cause to think about stuff in ways that you haven’t thought about them before. I’ll be back next week with more to say.