Have you ever set yourself goals so bad that you end up feeling exhausted and depleted after it’s done? Or worse, picked a project that ended up making you feel guilt or shame? I know I have.
I remember the day I decided I wanted to play The Sims 4 and fulfill ALL of my sim’s skills and get ALL the unlocks from ALL the careers. Or when I wanted to record a second of my day every day for a year. No matter how much I loved it at the moment, eventually, frustration would creep in, and the projects would languish.
Good goals are there to give direction to your life and help you develop your talents.
Bad goals are the ones you don’t really want or may be loaded with emotional baggage, false data, and unrealistic expectations. It may cause problems, raises difficulties, introduces complexities, among other things. A good goal, however, facilitates success.
A good goal is simply a statement of what you want. It’s the outcome toward which effort and action are directed or coordinated.
So how do we come up with good goals?
7 types of Bad Goals
1. Ineffective Goals
The first step in effective goal setting is to ask yourself what actions will you take to achieve your goal. When you set vague goals, you don’t have direction and have no focus, which can cause stress.
Vague: “To make more money in the next 12 months.”
Effective: “Beta test an online course to validate and keep developing my idea.”
2. Aggressive goals
It may seem counterintuitive, especially if you have high-bar goals, but here’s the thing: pressure and stress prevent us from making decisions that will benefit us in the long run. Instead, ask yourself what is reasonable for you? What have you done in the past? What can you accomplish? Whether this requires more work or doing less work, it’s up to you what works for you.
Aggressive: “I will run 10k every day for a month.”
Compassionate: “I will go out for a run for 15-30 minutes on Mon/Wed/Fri.”
3. All or nothing goals
Setting a goal where you need to change your behaviour entirely to achieve it is often ineffective. Instead of setting such goals, consider how you can change how you respond to situations that could lead you to more successful goals.
All or nothing: “I will never eat chocolate again.”
Better than nothing: “I will eat one piece of dark chocolate at night.”
4. Unrealistic goals
Are your goals always above and beyond? If you always strive to make incredible efforts, that approach can be demotivating when you notice a project takes longer than expected. It also makes it seem like there’s always a higher bar. Although, if you set the bar low as a way of being optimistic, then it can inadvertently suppress your performance.
If it’s a large goal with a long timeline, such as ‘I want to retire rich,’ you need to break it down into smaller sub-goals that are easier to achieve.
Unrealistic: “I will build and launch an app in a week.”
Realistic: “I will create an app’s proof of concept by next Friday.”
5. Other people’s goals
When we leave our ambitions up to other people, we often end up with goals that don’t excite us or, worse, burnt out. It’s in these moments when it helps to recall what do we value in life.
What other people want: “For me to become a doctor.”
What I want: “To become a fashion designer.”
6. Disconnected goals
These goals are the ones disconnected from your values, responsibilities and principles. Some of us tend to fall into the trap of setting disconnected goals. If you feel like you keep making the same mistakes, it might be because your goals are not related to a bigger picture or any of your values.
Disconnected: “To memorize the dictionary.”
Connected: “To pass the first 10 levels of Italian in Duolingo.”
7. Undesired goals
Fear-based goals are made of the things that you don’t really want. If you want to set better goals, you need to decide if that’s something you actually want to do, which means it needs to feel good, enticing or exciting. The other part of the equation is to know why I am doing it.
Undesired: “To scale my business to 100 employees by next year.”
Desired: “To add 5 new team members within the next couple of years.”
Setting goals is essential in any productivity system. It is the first and most important step in achieving success.
A bad goal focuses on counterproductive activities, effectively reducing the net effect of your effort. It will likely misdirect your attention and energy. It’s a goal that will fail, and in the worst case, may even harm your business or others.
I hope that you are setting clear and compassionate goals you want to achieve, the ones connected to your values and desires. There might be exceptions along the way, but focus on what you want, and you’ll achieve it.
