How We Achieve Our Goals

November 13, 2018

In the previous post on the basics of neurons, I described being undermotivated and overinhibited as two ways we do not achieve our goals. There are also two other ways of personal goal setting which bear some relationship to each other. The first is to have a poorly defined goal (or no goal at all!), and the second is to have no strategy for achieving that goal.

There are two basic types of goal setting: having something or doing something. I like to think of these as noun goals and verb goals. We all have noun goals: a wonderful relationship, a bigger house, a new car, a great vacation, a better job, a million dollars, better health, or a smaller, lighter body. All of that is great, as they all make for a richer, more enjoyable life. Yet having all those things presumes that we have obtained them somehow. However, obtaining noun goals requires actions described by verb goals.

The folly of wanting alone is aptly described by this old Scottish proverb: “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” Lusting after a bigger house or a finer car wouldn’t get that for you — only enacting specific behaviors designed to achieve those goals will.

Take, for example, the desire for a bigger house. Can you afford it already? If the answer is no, then you have to enact a verb goal. In this instance, either save enough money or earn more. Most likely, you’ll need to earn more, and to do that you’ll need to earn a promotion, get a higher paying job elsewhere, sell more, or start your own business. In order to earn a promotion, you could increase your skill set, improve your relationships inside the organization, or contribute more inside your current position. All of these are effective and smart goal-setting strategies.  Alternatively, you could sit back, wait for the person above you to move on, and hope you get picked. The last of those strategies is the easiest, but the least likely to bear fruit, let alone in an acceptable timeframe.

Even though the last strategy listed holds out the least hope for effectiveness, no strategy is guaranteed to work. Failure, it turns out, is an option. Not only is it an option, but if you don’t make enough efforts, failure is an inevitability. Not every strategy succeeds. However, the only strategy guaranteed to fail over the long run is inaction and resignation.

We fail to reach our goals, then, if we are undermotivated, overinhibited, don’t have clear goals, and have no defined strategy to achieve them. On the flip side, reaching our personal goals simply require that we have desires — noun goals — and pursue them with well-designed behaviors.