How to plan your life goals: Goal setting is not for you?This is how you can still succeed

Perhaps during Covid, when your industry collapsed and you were unemployed, your five-year goal fell through. Maybe you know that the New Year’s goal of going to the gym does not work for you.Maybe Target setting Not for you. So how will you succeed? The good news is that the most shockingly successful people rarely follow the goal-setting method. Steve Jobs once said a famous saying: “Looking forward to the future, you can’t connect the bits and pieces.” Let’s see how to take a better path.

The old idea is to determine where you are and where you want, and this is the goal. The distance is the gap to be covered within the deadline. The masters recommend BHAG-put your eyes on the big furry bold goal. Then work backward through the timeline to find intermediate milestones. These became SMART goals-specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. The idea is to follow the pre-planned steps within the deadline to move straight from your location to your goal. Does this work for you?

Soldiers have a proverb: “There is no plan to survive contact with the enemy.” Does anyone plan to survive the 2020 Covid Challenge? Therefore, first, make a plan based on past data and experience. However, your business and social conditions are changing faster than ever, and the speed of technological change makes it difficult to predict the future.

Secondly, when encountering unforeseen challenges such as accidents, diseases, deaths or market changes, strict linear plans will soon fail. Third, over time, it is boring and will make you lose motivation. Finally, goal setting applies to well-defined rule-based activities, such as sports or obtaining an education degree, but it fails miserably in business or creative arts, because success depends on multiple moving parts.

If you are an organized person or a perfectionist who thrives on a list, then goal setting is useful for you. If you are a person who is good at analyzing or thinking, then the road of continuous learning is more effective for success. If your main characteristic is empathy and the focus is on people, then collaborative projects with good enough results are your best approach. Finally, if you are rebellious, artistic or spontaneous, and hate micro-management and rigid rules, choose a broad trajectory rather than a fixed milestone to feel the vitality of each day.

• Stepping stones to success

In “Why Can’t You Plan Great: The Myth of Goals,” authors Kenneth and Joel argue that goal setting can actually make you fail. A distant goal requires many milestones. Due to factors beyond your control, complicated circumstances, and insufficient information, you mispredicted these and reached a dead end.

The alternative they proposed is simple-a stepping stone system. Jump one stepping stone at a time. Therefore, you only focus on the next step that you can control and decide whether it is good. Most super-successful Nobel Prize winners pursue multiple interests. The reason for their success is a combination of multiple factors, rather than a path based on linear goals. Similarly, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk have tortuously crossed multiple stepping stones in their journey to achieve great results. Interestingly, in this system, as long as you are only one step away from the goal, and under your control, goal setting is also effective.

How do you choose the next stepping stone? Forget to find out the goal or destination. Just looking for novelty. Suppose you work in sales and your competitor is using a technology that you find novel and interesting. Explore it in the next few weeks until you are satisfied. That is the stepping stone you use. By keeping it simple, real, and instant, you have taken actions within your control, or learned something or achieved something. Therefore, you have piled up stepping stones during your journey. When you are curious, you will seek novelty. Fortunately, curiosity is a great motivation and energy.As Eric Schmidt, the former CEO Google That said, curiosity and perseverance together are the biggest predictors of future success. How do you use your curiosity to decide which stepping stone to choose? First ask yourself whether the stepping stones meet the standards of the novel. If so, ask yourself if you feel curious enough to expend a lot of sweat to explore it. If so, you have found the next step. To get the next stone, you need to persevere, which is a supplement to curiosity. Using the famous five-hour rule, created by author and entrepreneur Michael Simmons, he studied successful people, including Benjamin Franklin, Obama, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and others. Each of them spends one hour or five hours dedicated to study every day or every week. The five-hour rule can be used in three steps: reading, reflecting, and experimenting. Start with at least 30 minutes to 1 hour of reading a week. Reflect on what you have learned and how to apply it to your life or work. Try to apply your knowledge and see how they are successful. Every week, five hours add up to a lot of useful learning and actions to push you towards great feats!

Personality and choice

1. a music seeker

The power of 3. When you are happy, are you at your best? Perhaps, painting makes you happy, because creativity makes you full. In addition to creativity, there are also two values ​​that satisfy you. Do at least one activity a day and three activities a week. You will find success through flow, freedom and fun.

2. Doomsday worries

30-day habit. Do you spend a lot of time worrying about small and big things? No energy to set and achieve goals. Instead, adopt a personal mantra and make it a 30-day challenge. This can be as simple as “walking 30 minutes every day when you make a phone call.” You develop 12 good habits/skills in a year.

3. Big picture people

Design a dream. Do you hate small details and like to focus on the vision? Write down all your dreams for one, three, and five years on the whiteboard. Take a step back and observe. The things that really matter will be combined into one big dream. Relive your dreams often and move in the right direction with enthusiasm.

4. Free and unrestrained

The trend is your friend. You are a person who likes to live in the moment. You like the concept of freedom and hate rigidity, rules, and daily milestones. Therefore, instead of thinking about what went wrong in Covid, it is better to focus on what is working and accelerating in your life. It may be a relationship at the moment. Follow the trend and carry it forward until it lasts. Then choose the next trend and so on to be successful.

5. Pass the analyzer

A word. You are a procrastinator. It may be because you have over-analyzed your options and become paralyzed by fear of failure. Use the One-Word concept to move. Choose a word, say communication or 80:20 and realize all activities by communicating regularly or doing 20% ​​of things to produce 80% of the results. Your actions add up to success.

(the author is Profession The coach, mentor, and author of your sorting hat. )