SETTING GOALS

http://www.joelalain.com/why-you-should-never-succeed-all-your-monthly-goals/, http://www.thinkfoolishly.com/search/label/Creative%20Problem%20Solving

When I set new goals, new challenges for the week / month / life, I always do them in this fashion:

1.    a few easy goals. It is VERY important to build up with many small, easy, but important goals. Easy wins are key for motivation.

2.    a few hard goals. Hard goals are the ones that lead to immediate progress. They are CRUCIAL.

a . a few impossible goals. Yes. Like in “I think it’s stupid to put that on my list since they are impossible”. Impossible are the ones that enable LATERAL THINKING in order to solve them. If you want to think like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, then this is what you must do.

A Few Easy goals

Easy goals are meant to give me momentum by having early, easy wins to build on. Over the year, I’ve tested many, many ways of setting goals and I used to only put crazy impossible goals and since I failed most of the time, it did not leave a pleasant imprint in my brain. So I decided to add easy goals, but I chose things that I really needed / wanted to do in order to improve an area of my life.

Easy goals are things like yoga, eating well, losing weight, doing things I’m used to doing but consistently, etc. Easy goal does not mean “not important”! In fact it’s quite the opposite: easy goals are often crucial but we just never set the time to do them or build the habits.

A Few Hard Goals

Hard goals are goals that are hard and usually need some pressure or incentive for me to do. I think as humans, we are inclined to make it as easy as possible on ourselves because we hate to have a hard time and always much prefer to take it easy. These goals are meant to push myself outside of my comfort zone and accomplish something that will make me both proud as well as make progress toward my life goal. We tend to avoid hard things, therefore they must be present in all my monthly goal in order to progress.

Think of hard goals like this: if [insert your favorite guru here] was my coach and I paid him 1000$ per week to get me to my goals, WHAT WOULD HE TELL ME TO DO?

For example, when I trained today , I had to climb 50 flights of stairs as part of my training. I could have done that and then stopped. BUT, I thought to myself: “If Arnold Schwarzenegger was my personal trainer, what would he tell me?” Arnold:”DO 25 MORE!” Me “But, but, it’s -35 Celsius outside, I’m tired, blablabla” Arnold: “THEN DO 50 MORE. GO!”. And so I did, 100. I was totally burnt after, but it was worth it. We always make it easy on ourselves.

Hard goals are things like: taking strangers in picture, getting published in another blog, doing a Kickstarter campaign, delegating complex tasks, launching apps & websites, doing twice the training, etc.

A Few Impossible goals

These goals are special: they are meant to ONLY be succeeded IF I think outside the box. In other words, I can’t solve them using common practices or common logic or normal behaviors or normal work methods or knowledge. I MUST think outside the box, look at the problem sideway, break convention, think 10X instead of 10% improvement, try new more risky approaches, and so on. These goals will RARELY succeed. At any point, if I see that I keep succeeding at the Impossible Goals, I’ll need to re-evaluate, because it means I’m not making them hard enough. I think that on 10 impossible goals, I should succeed at around 10 or 20%.

How to set impossible goals?

   do something in 25% the time you would normally allocate

·         do something by adding 2x more constraints in material, people you can work with, tools, etc.

·         try to accomplish 10 times more in the same given time as otherwise

·         etcThe biggest problem is that if we always give ourselves “normal, non risky” goals, then it means that we’re always using the same methods and mindset to solve them. But when suddenly you must do 10X in the same amount of time, you’ll see that you MUST think differently otherwise it’s just impossible. I find the impossible goals very exciting.

Even when you fail at these, you learn a LOT and you experiment and break your own “mold of thinking” and that leads to much more progress later on.

* note: I might get better at problem solving and pushing forward in new directions in the future, but in general impossible goals should be very very failure-prone.