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Connecting Short, Medium, And Long-Term Goals · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: I pressed the one button.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh jeez.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of an idiot am I?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Alright.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm this kind of an idiot.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Useful, useful idiot.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, okay.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, Paul, let's talk goals.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Most people know they need them, but connecting the short term with the long term can be tricky.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, when we're talking goals here, we're talking in the sort of businessy sense or personal sense, not the not the kind you score in a uh in a football game.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: No, not the goal, but like yeah, goals.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's well, most people need most people know they need them.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's even start there, right?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Do people need goals?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's actually some interesting literature out there to say that um that it's perfectly possible to lead a highly successful life with very minimal goals or even no goals.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and there are categories of people, small numbers of them, that are comfortable, deeply comfortable living, um living in a day to in the day-to-day.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: And whatever opportunities come, maybe they'll take them, but they're doing nothing concrete in terms of the forward, the forward planning look.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: They are the what I refer to as the kind of you know, what will be will be type people.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: They tend to be more creative in nature, um, and they often can have very successful careers, even though they've never defined a goal in their life.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, um, so I think it's important to state that.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that's not everybody.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: And um and for many of us, the idea of uh actually creating goals and using goals as kind of like a guidance system can be really can be really helpful.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um it can help you retain motivation more in the short term as well.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: It can help build resilience as well, um, because you've got this bigger thing that you're working towards um that helps guide what you do on the uh on the day-to-day.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they're they are they are useful, but I would argue that um the way in which people often set them is kind of broken.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and they can actually be counterproductive in certain set in certain circumstances.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Even if they're you know, so so-called smart goals, write them in a way that they can be seen, that they have visible results, all of those kind of things.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um even the fact that they're annual, yeah, you're making me think now is sort of is that always the way to approach them anyway?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you need a better mix?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And saying, like you said earlier, too, like maybe you don't need them.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, maybe some people don't need them.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's yeah, wow, that's fascinating.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me more about that.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's start with the the with the sort of different kind of goals that that exist and and are out there, right?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what you you kind of alluded to one, which is the goals that organizations set and teams set and people within teams, right?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: And those tend to be, like you say, often annual and often not more than annual, not longer term than annual.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, why do we do that?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: We do that because it's it's too much overhead to, for example, in most cases, in many organizations, it's too much overhead to do it more often than annually.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's considered to be too much of a stress or a push on employees to update them more often than annually.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as most people know, we we mentioned OKRs in the in the last episode, right?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: OKRs tend to have a 90-day time horizon versus a versus a year time horizon.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so organizations sometimes equate uh their goals to to these OKRs, or they may have OKRs associated uh and then in addition to that, have kind of annual goals.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but at least the OKR gets you to a point where effectively you're shortening your time horizon down to to three months, and three months feels like something that is actionable on, right?
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: You've got enough time to actually potentially make a difference on something, um, but not so much time that it seems to stretch out to you, uh stretch out to you forever.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: So those are the ones that kind of happen in the uh in the business setting.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, then in our lives, um many of us use goal setting as means of doing something that is significantly longer term than that, right?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe in five years you wanna uh you're a triathlete, and in five years you want to do Kona, right?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: So if that if that's your goal, it might take you five years to get there, right?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Especially if you're sitting on the couch right now eating potato chips.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: It might take you five years to get to that point.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: That five-year goal can be the structure which kind of get which kind of gets you to where you need to be.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um But as I mentioned, the the structures are are put in place to serve a particular purpose.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the fundamental belief that they um that people have when they set these goals is sort of centered around the idea of like, well, we wouldn't have got to the moon if we hadn't have decided to try.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's true, right?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there would be if nobody had an ambition to get to the moon, if nobody defined that we were going to get to the moon, we wouldn't have got there.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: But what it ignores is the flip side of that.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where it can become potentially damaging, which is that um the vast majority of our goals, particularly the vast majority of our stretch goals, we will not reach.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: We will not meet.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: We will not meet them because life intervenes.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say, for example, if you had been born in the 1980s uh, let's say you've been born in the late 1980s, and your stretch goal um was to become to have a job that doesn't exist anymore, right?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Which a lot of jobs from the 1980s don't uh don't exist anymore, right?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, uh, or where almost no where almost nobody does them.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of where we're where we sit now, right?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: People set a lot of these goals, they're often job-related goals, and those goals don't exist anymore, or the jobs themselves don't exist, or the thing they want to be doesn't exist anymore.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is where it can become damaging, which is why you do have this sort of like counterculture of people that don't even set them in the first place.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: And they just say, you know, we're gonna we're gonna get the best out of every day and we're gonna see where it takes us.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: I I couldn't help but think of like, oh, I want to own a video store someday.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oh man, just gone in an instant, crazy.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Precisely.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, your long-term goals must shift over time.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: They just have to what we generally recommend for people that want to go down this path, um, and this is actually a variant of this applies for organizations as well, is if you want to, if if you want to be using goals and you want to be using them effectively, you need to think in terms of different time horizons.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: So when you're thinking about your long-term goals, try to avoid making those long-term goals too specific.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Make them goals that are associated with attributes of things that you that you might like.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: So rather than saying, uh, we talked about this a little bit in our career one, but rather than saying, I want to be a chief financial officer of this type of company, right?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Start to think about what the attributes of a chief of a chief financial officer are, what you love about those things, what's great about those things, and that you want to do a role that embodies those things, which today is the chief financial officer of blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you think about it in those terms, then as you pull the time horizon back towards the present, you can then start, you can then start getting much more specific, not just in terms of what it is you're looking to accomplish, but the actions that you're going to perform in order to accomplish them.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then until you get to the point where you're thinking about what you're doing in the next week or the next three months, and you are and you are performing that action with great specificity.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then to tie it back to the thing that we mentioned also on the on the career podcast, an essential piece of this, Matt, an essential piece of this is you've got to enjoy the journey.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, the vast majority of long-term goals you will not reach in the exact way in which you framed them.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're hating the journey to this destination that you're not going to get to, then man, it's going to be a sucky five years.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: So make sure that the journey itself is enjoyable.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then for many people, once they actually really, really start to enjoy the journey, then the goal itself becomes less important, which gets us all the way back to where we started the park.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then how do you connect them long, short, medium-term goals and over this time horizon?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, when we work with people, we do it, it's almost really simple, right?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Just a table, right?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: So create that longer goal, then pull your way back, and then pull your way back.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to do this.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to get my my one-year checkpoint towards where I'm going is this, and these are the actions I'm going to perform.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: My three-month checkpoint associated with that, and here are the things I'm going to perform, and then here's what I'm going to do in the next day or the next week, something like that.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: You can do it with it just literally with a simple table.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Lots to think about on this one.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Paul.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: See ya.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 10:07
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• 10:11
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• 10:13
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