#6 - What can Goals do for me?
There are two main reasons people are not satisfied. Either they don’t know what they want to achieve, or they haven’t achieved it yet. We’ve talked quite a bit about what success is so hopefully at this point you have an idea what you hope to achieve. Your idea of being successful could be: making varsity, going to state, winning the conference championship, earning a college scholarship, setting a new PR, being able to dunk, there are lots of options!
Once you know what you want, you have to actually do it. That’s easier said than done—if it was easy, you’d have already done it and it wouldn’t be a goal. Breaking out of that inertia to jump to the next level is hard. You know what I’m talking about: why is it so hard to stop watching Netflix and go to bed even when we know that we’ll be miserable tomorrow if we don’t sleep? Inertia is strong so we need some help to break out and achieve success and that’s were goal setting comes in. Goal setting is so valuable because it provides us with two things: direction and structure.
Direction is a vision of where we are going. What do you want? What will make you happier/more successful/smarter/healthier/etc.? The difference between the want and a goal is the direction. “I want to read more” is a “want” but provides no direction: it’s not a goal. How would you possibly read more with a goal like that? A goal provides direction like “I will read 1 book per week.” Direction is an important part of any goal because it helps us figure out how important the goal actually is to us and what we actually need to do to be successful in our own eyes. “I will make state in cross country,” “I will set a new PR,” “I will increase my vertical enough to dunk.”
The other key to actually achieving what you want is structure. Structure is something that will hold us accountable, something we can measure against, and something we can achieve victory with. In order to stop being just an athlete that shows up, we need to be held accountable. Why is it so easy to show up on time when there are consequences? Because you’re being held accountable. It’s also important to have something to measure against—how else would you know if you’re getting closer to what you want? Finally, you need have some motivation, an end goal that you can accomplish and strive towards. Goals satisfy all these needs by providing something to be compared against, held accountable to, and motivated by.
Did you know that only 3% of American’s set written goals? Amazingly this small minority consistently outperforms the remaining 97% who fail to set goals. The reason is because it’s hard to hit a target if you don’t know what the target is (no goals) or don’t have a plan to get there (direction and structure).
We are going to talk about how to set and achieve goals more over the next few sections but today, think about what goals you could set. What do you want to achieve? Share your goals like this, “Today I am #advancingdaily on my goal to make state!”