Set Goals

There’s a lot to say here, so I’ll cut to the chase: you have to set goals. If you want to have any say in the direction your life takes, you must set goals. This article is first on the success side of the website because this practice is foundational to what Jim Rohn called “designing your life”. As I said in What Is Success, I consider working toward your success in fact to be working on one type of happiness: happiness with your life. Step one of building a life that makes you happy and of reaches your potential is to think about and write down the things you want to accomplish.

Now understand from the beginning that writing goals is not the whole process. Goals don’t achieve themselves. At its most basic, success is about achieving the goals you set and is a three step process: set your goals, figure out the behaviors you need to achieve them, and stick with those behaviors long enough to do it. Not always easy—sometimes in fact quite difficult—but nonetheless straightforward. But even though it’s our behaviors that get us to our goals, we must not underestimate how important it is to start by setting good goals and then to revisit those goals regularly. If you’re building a house, you want an excellent set of blueprints before you start and you want to keep checking those blueprints as you do the work.

What we want to do is create three goal timelines: life, five year, and one year. These three time horizons will give you the opportunity to make big, aspirational plans and also set short term goals that take into account the tasks and responsibilities that get in the way of accomplishing your dreams. First you will put in the effort to create these lists. After you’ve done that, you will rewrite them in full at least twice a week for decades. That second part probably sounds extreme or silly to you. I’ll cover in a bit why I think it’s important to your progress, but first let’s talk about how to build your lists.

Your first list will be your life goals. You want to start by thinking about anything and everything that you feel is truly important to accomplish in your life. If you have kids, perhaps that will include raising them well (you’ll have to think about what that means specifically) and making sure they receive a good education. If you don’t have kids, but want them, building a family goes on your list. If having a high earning or respected career is important to you, put it on the list. If you want to give a large amount of money to charity or spend years as a foster parent, it goes on the list. When creating your first goals, you want to think about what matters so much to you that, if you fail to achieve it, you will feel that your life has in some sense also been a failure or at least that you have failed to reach your potential. You’re not going to put down things that you wish you had done if the opportunity has passed. You’re starting where you are right now. Regrets should only interact with our goal lists if we can achieve something in our future to help with those regrets. And you must be willing to put down everything that really matters to you. You must not refuse to write something down because you fear that you might fail to achieve it. You might indeed fail—we all have to face that possibility—but refusing even to set the goal means that you certainly will.

After you write down the most important goals, think about what else you would like to accomplish: travel the world, write a book, ride a bicycle across the country, learn to paint, turn a hobby into a retirement business, play the piano—there is no limit to the possibilities. The range of importance here is wide: you can have goals that verge on being part of that group of life-defining goals, and you can have other items that aren’t nearly so important. On my life goals list I have “Give $10 million to charity” (very important to me), “Learn three foreign languages” (still important without being critical), and “Learn to dive from a 35’ board” (not in fact important, but still a great goal to work on someday, especially as can barely dive from a 3’ board right now).

A couple of things about the life goals list. First, you’re not putting down daydreams. When I’m pushing myself hard on the stairmaster, I sometimes imagine playing in the NBA (and I’m really good—I change the game), but making it to the NBA is not on my life goals list. Second, you’re not going to put down a hundred items. There are thousands of things to do in this world: careers to work in, places to visit, skills to learn. But you can’t do them all. Don’t try to figure out everything you might possibly squeeze into the rest of your life. (“Let’s see, I’m thirty-two now, so I might have sixty-three years left, so maybe I can put 127 things on my life goals list.”) While you can certainly change your career, you can’t look at all of the careers you’ve ever had an interest in and plan to do them all. You can’t look at every cool thing you see other people doing, from rock climbing to traveling across South America to writing novels, and think that you can do them all. You can’t. And even if you had the time, which you don’t, you’d find out for many of them that you don’t really have the motivation required to become a long-distance cyclist, learn Japanese, etc. because they’re not really that interesting to you. Your job when creating this list is to think about things that really matter to you. My advice is to make twenty items your maximum, though you can have as few as three to start with. If twenty seems too few, don’t worry: you can and will add more as you live your life and continue this work.

Now that you’ve made a life goals list, it’s time to make a five year list. This is my favorite list. It is the bridge between all the stuff we have to do in the present, which we will guide with our one year goals, and the aspirations of our life goals. The life list is terrific—obviously I’m a big fan—but it has a couple of flaws. First, it doesn’t give a sense of urgency because unconsciously we tend to feel like we’re going to die in about two hundred years, so anything we want to do before we die can wait twenty years before we even get started. Second, it doesn’t give much guidance as to how we should act right now: this month, this week, and today. Our goal lists should give us guidance or there’s no point in writing them even once, let alone twice a week.

Five year goals are great because they do give a sense that the clock is ticking. Five years is a good chunk of time. You can get a lot done in five years and if I tell you that something is going to happen in five years, it doesn’t feel like it’s right around the corner. But it also doesn’t feel like a distant future: you know that you have to get to work soon if you want to accomplish a big goal in five years. And a five year goal can give you some idea of what you should do now.  “Travel the world” might sound great as life goal, but doesn’t tell you much about what to do this year. But “Visit five countries in South America” on your five year list gives you a direction that you can make more precise on your one year list.

So how do we make a five year list? Well, first we go through each item on our life goals list and say to ourselves, “Am I going to achieve or work toward this goal in the next five years?” The answer can certainly be no. For example, I have “Fly planes” on my life goals list, but I know that in the next five years I can’t spend the time or the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to earn a pilot’s license. So it’s not on the five year list. But maybe the answer is yes (and for our biggest projects, the answer should nearly alway be yes). With a yes answer, you ask the follow up question:  “Can I accomplish the whole thing in the next five years?” If that answer is also yes, you put the life goal in full on your five year list. If the answer is no, then you think of a useful and realistic intermediate goal to put down. So if you have “Own ten houses” on your life goals list, you can put “Buy my first house” on your five year goals list. If you already have a house, you’d put “Buy a second house” on your five year list. Or maybe you currently have $30,000 in personal loans and credit card debt, so you would have “Pay off debt” on your five year list. You would keep the same life goal, but push down buying your first house until the next five year list.

Once you’ve reviewed each item from your life list, it’s time to consider what else should go on the five year list. There might be things you’d really enjoy doing—traveling to a particular place, learning a certain skill, throwing a twentieth anniversary party—that aren’t on the life list. Write them down. There also might be things that are not about your goals, but that you simply have to get done: helping your kids get into college, giving more support to your aging parents, getting new training or licensing for your career, moving to a new city. If there’s a big project that must get done in the next five years, it should go on your list. On the five year list and especially on the one year list, we must take into account the things we have to do so that we can properly plan our time for the things we want to do. If we don’t take these responsibilities into account, we will overestimate how much we will get done. We will end up both surprised and disappointed at how often life gets in our way.

Okay, we’ve created our five year goal list. What’s next? Yes: the one year goal list. And what do we do first? Exactly: we go through each item on the five year list and ask, “Am I going to accomplish or work on this goal this year?” Just as the five year list is a stepping stone to the life list, the one year list is a stepping stone to the five year list. So to go back to the example of real estate, if you have “Buy ten houses” on your life goals list, you might have “Buy my first house” on your five year list. If you think that you should have $50,000 as a down payment for an FHA loan on that house, you might put “Save $10,000 towards the down payment” on your one year list. Or it might be “Pay off credit card debt” on the one year list with the plan of starting to build the down payment next year. You need to make a useful and realistic goal based on where you are right now.

Realism is critical with the one year goal list. First of all, it is the one year list that is really going to guide us in our daily and weekly behaviors, so these items will have the most interference from all of the life stuff that has to get done: going to work, taking the kids to school, getting groceries, seeing the dentist, helping our parents, and on and on. Now you’re not going to write down on your one year list “Bring kids to school five days a week,” but you must account, to the best of your ability, for how much of your time will be taken up by such responsibilities. You must put in real thought when you’re making your list and think, “Am I going to be able to put in twenty hours a week on the goals I really want, or ten, or three?” If it’s only three per week, you’re just not going to be able to make a ton of progress over the course of the year and you should admit that up front. You don’t want to be caught off guard by your slow progress because it will be very easy to quit when you feel that frustration.

Further, as with the five year list, we have to put down any big project that is going to take our time. You may or may not want to replace the carpet in your house, but if you think you must do it this year, then it needs to be on the list. Otherwise you’ll be caught by surprise when it gets in the way of the goals that mean more to you. Of course most of the stuff that takes up our time isn’t the big projects, but the list of daily responsibilities that I mentioned a minute ago. The combination of big projects and daily tasks will be the biggest obstacle to accomplishing your goals, though the loss of your initial enthusiasm will be a close second. I’ll talk about these issues in Work Your Behaviors and Stick With Things Beyond Enthusiasm.

The second way in which realism is important with our one year list is that we tend to bite off more than we can chew while caught up in the enthusiasm of getting ourselves on the right track in life. Tony Robbins has said that people tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in one year and underestimate what they can accomplish in ten or twenty years. It’s usually our newfound enthusiasm and determination that make us overestimate what we can do in twelve months. We get so pumped about saving the down payment for a house—and it feels so good to believe in ourselves—that we decide we’re going to save half of our down payment this year. It may be that we’ve never saved more than $500 in our lives, but this is the year that we’ll save $25,000. Or we’ll lose thirty pounds this year. Or we’re going to become fantastic cooks by Dec 31. When we’re really feeling pumped, we might even tell ourselves that we’re going to make amazing progress on all of these goals this year. Now it’s not that remarkable progress isn’t possible in a single year. It is, but it requires remarkable commitment of time and effort. To make that commitment in one area of your life means that you almost surely can’t make it in another. And the truth is that enthusiasm almost never lasts for an entire year. (Again,see Stick With Things Beyond Enthusiasm.) We want to be realistic about how much effort we can and will put in so that we can make one year goals that make sense. Having one year goals that are inflated actually makes you less likely to achieve tremendous things over the next ten or twenty years because your failures can make you quit. So be realistic.

Now you’ve made your life goals list, your five year goals list, and your one year goals list. If you’ve done all this for the first time, you should be proud of yourself because it surely took some time, thought, and soul searching. Though as I’ve said, you don’t have to overdo the soul searching during the initial process because you will have years to consider and reconsider what is meaningful to you. Now what do we do next—create a six month list, a one quarter list, a month list? No. We’re done building lists. These are your big three: the life, the five year, and the one year. You’re not going to keep working them back towards the present until you’ve planned out the next sixty minutes. I’m all for using things like To Do lists and calendars lists to plan your month, your week, your day, or your morning. (I’ll talk about that more in Work Your Behaviors.) But those timeframes are too small to use in designing your life, and that’s what we’re doing with the goal lists that we’re going to write over and over.

Why don’t we keep moving to smaller increments of time and creating more lists? (I know some of you will be disappointed by stopping at the one year because some people just love making lists and plans, while others fear the idea of not having instructions for every moment.) There is a danger in creating lists like these and in repeatedly writing them down as I’m telling you to do, which is that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we’re doing the productive work of achieving our goals just by writing our lists. We almost can’t help saying to ourselves after setting life goals, then setting five year goals that help us reach them, then setting one year goals that help us reach both, “Wow, I’m halfway there!” You’re not. I believe in setting goals—as we can see by the fact that I’m 3,000 words into this article on goal setting—but, as I’ve said, goals don’t achieve themselves. Setting a goal doesn’t get you there. If we did the work of creating and regularly rewriting six goal lists—life, five year, one year, six month, one month, one week—it would be so time consuming, especially as the last three would have to be recreated so often, that we’d feel all the more that we’d put in enough effort for the day and deserve a break. We want our goal lists to be useful in designing our lives and guiding our behaviors, but short enough that we can write them all out in fifteen minutes or less.

So now that we’ve built our three goal lists, what do we do with them? Well, two things. 1) We build behaviors to get us to the goals. As I said above, achieving goals is simple though rarely easy: we set goals, choose behaviors, and stick with the behaviors. I’ll take on choosing behaviors in the next article on success: Work Your Behaviors. 2) We write the three goal lists again and again and again. Specifically, we write out all three goal lists at least twice a week until we reach all of our goals or until we die. (I myself fully expect to live my last days still pursuing goals.) So to be very clear on this instruction: at least twice a week, I want you to sit down with a pen and paper and write down all three goal lists in full. (I use a pen and paper, but you’re allowed to use an electronic device. A danger in doing so is that it’s so easy to save files on electronic devices and so you might get in the habit of just looking at the lists you’ve written instead of actually rewriting them, which actually means that you won’t internalize them as well.) Just like the gratitude lists I urge you to write (see Gratitude), you don’t need to keep them once they’re written. I write mine on scratch paper that I recycle when I’m done. If I did write them on a computer, I would delete the page once I finished. “Why?”, I hear you ask. “What are we doing this for?” Let’s talk about it.

Most people don’t use goal lists. But as it’s a common piece of advice in the personal development world—as I’ve said more than once, I didn’t invent this stuff—many people have given it a try at least once. Here’s what usually happens. They write a list, but maybe have no idea what to do with it when they’re done, so it ends up—perhaps after sitting on the kitchen table for a couple of days—going into a drawer or into a file folder. Or maybe they’ve been told by whatever source inspired them to write the list that they should tape it up next to their bed or on their fridge, and they do so. The problem is that it’s incredibly easy to stop noticing things in our environment. When a list like that is new, we see it and maybe stop to read through it (maybe). But after a week or so we don’t even register its presence. What possible effect can it have on our lives if we stop looking at it a couple of weeks after we’ve written it? None, of course.

Often people write goal lists and then come across them months or years later and think, “Oh yeah—I remember that.” Obviously, those goals that were never achieved. It is hard enough changing our behaviors to reach goals when we’re actively thinking about them. You don’t want to make it impossible by not thinking about them at all. And there’s almost nothing easier than letting our goals slip out of our consciousness. We can read an article like this and realize how important they are, but in our day to day existence the big aspirations of life feel so disconnected. We need to keep our goals always accessible, and hopefully always influential. It’s not that we shouldn’t go two minutes without thinking about them, but they should never be far from our prefrontal cortex—the executive function part of our brain that makes choices and tries to exert a positive influence on our behaviors. How do we keep them so present? We write them, in full, at least twice a week.

Now if you’ve done some quick math, you know that this is really going to add up. If you have a goal that takes a year to get to, you’ll have written it down, along with all of your other goals, more than a hundred times. If you have a goal that takes you five years, that’s more than 500 times you’ll have written it—and more than that if you have it on both your five year and one year lists for part of that time. If you have a goal that takes twenty years to achieve, you’ll write it more than two thousand times as you work towards it. And it’s perfectly possible that there will be years you’re not working on that goal at all even though you’re writing it over and over again. Is that really what I’m telling you to do? Yes—one hundred percent. I have no problem with you writing a life goal three thousand times over thirty years if doing so helps you achieve it. We will absolutely fail to design our lives if we see goal setting as something we do once a year and not something we need to push into our consciousness. Writing your three goal lists over and over will keep you aware of them—and often keep you aware of how far you are from them. Initially, building your lists will take a fair bit of time, but once you know them well, writing all three lists should take you fifteen to twenty minutes (as long as you follow instructions and keep yourself to twenty items or less). I do not consider it a waste of time that you spend thirty to forty minutes a week keeping what you want in life in front of your mind.

Another benefit to writing our goal lists so much is that we’re able to adjust them as we need or want. Maybe we achieve a goal and so can stop writing it down. Maybe we achieve one and so it’s time to add a subsequent goal. Maybe we realize we can’t achieve one now and so have to push it to later or make a smaller, interim goal. Maybe we realize we don’t care about a goal like we thought we did and we take it off. And of course maybe we think of new goals we want to add. Writing our goal lists so much is useful because it keeps them in our minds, but not as commandments set in stone. Instead they are adjustable, and much more useful because they are.

Now let’s say that I’ve convinced you that it’s a good idea to keep your goals always in the spotlight or at least in the periphery of your consciousness by writing them out twice a week. Let me talk for a minute about a complication that comes up with the passage of time. (I’m going to get into the weeds a bit here with an issue that doesn’t seem like a problem if you aren’t yet writing goal lists. But the issue will come up when you do the work, so I want to tackle it now.) As time goes by, your life goals list doesn’t have to change. You only change it when you’ve achieved a goal (so you stop writing it), you’ve decided you don’t actually want to achieve a goal (so you stop writing it), or you decide to add a new goal (so you start writing it). But what about your five year list—a year after you’ve written it, do you create a new list? And what about the one year list—after a month do you have to rewrite it and extend the goals by one month?

To answer this question, let’s start with the one year list because that’s where the problem presents itself most clearly. Should you write a new one year list every quarter, every month, or every week in order to keep the goal horizon a year out? I don’t think so, or at least I don’t. I think that recreating your one year list too often will be frustrating and actually make it hard to focus on the goals. They’ll feel too much like moving targets. Here’s what I do and what I recommend to you. If you’re writing in September or earlier, write your one year goal list to end Dec 31 of this year. So if it’s June when you read this article and decide to do this work, then your one year list will actually be a six month list. You’ll put “2025” at the top, or “2026”, etc. You don’t change those goals as you move into July or August—you’re still trying to achieve the same goals by Dec 31.

Now you might think, “Okay, so I should make my list in January of each year and work with that for twelve months.” Sort of. Remember that the one year list is supposed to be a stepping stone toward the five year list. While it is the goal list with the shortest time frame and with the most to say about what you can do today to get to your goals, it’s still supposed to give you a larger sense of perspective than you normally have as you go through your day. I don’t think that your one year list having a time horizon of less than three months gives you that perspective. So what I do is use my one year list through Sep 30, then write a new one in the first week of October. That list has the number of the next year written at the top. I intend to achieve the goals on it by Dec 31 of the following year. So at first my one year list is actually a fifteen month list. It’s only truly a one year list on Dec 31—three months after I create it. Because I don’t want to do the work of perpetually recreating my one year list, the time horizon gets shorter and shorter until the next October, when I build a new list.

The five year list has the same issue as the one year—the time horizon shortens with each passing day—though the problem doesn’t become pressing as quickly as with the one year list. Should we create a new five year list every year? That wouldn’t be as ridiculous as creating a new one year list every month or week, but it’s still not what I do. I like to set five year goals and then get the opportunity to work toward those exact goals for several years. So when I create a five year list, I write that same list for that whole first year (of course making adjustments as I need or want). At the start of the next year, I don’t change it even though it’s now actually a four year list. I go another year of writing the same goals. After that year, I still don’t change it even though it’s now a three year list. Our five year list is supposed to be a useful stepping stone toward our life goals and a useful guide for our one year goals, and I believe it can still do those two jobs when it has a three year horizon (which soon becomes a two and a half year horizon). But that’s really as far as I want to go. As we approach the end of the third year, the time horizon of the five year list is becoming two years and that’s just not long enough to help us make big steps toward our life goals or to give big picture guidance to our one year goals. So I recreate my five year list as I approach the end of the third year.

Now while I absolutely believe you should write life, five year, and one year goals, and that you should rewrite them twice a week to keep them fresh, I’m less concerned that you handle this issue of time passing the same way I do. You can rewrite your one year list every quarter or every six months, making the goals aim for twelve months later. Or you can just stick with the same goal list all the way through Dec 31 and write a new one year list in the first week of each year. For your five year list, you can choose to make a new one each year that has a true five year horizon. If you think one of those methods or an entirely different method works better than my practice, great. Maybe you’re right, or at least right for you.

Now if you’ve read this far in this over-long article, you’ve already shown some commitment to reaching your goals, designing our life, and achieving your potential. While I can tell you that you’re almost done reading, I unfortunately cannot tell you that you’re halfway to having a new life. You wouldn’t tell your yourself that you will become a great bike rider simply by purchasing a bike. It’s the same with reading an article or listening to a personal development podcast. These can be very useful steps, but they’re only initial steps. And the truth is—and I hope this doesn’t scare you—you never get to stop taking steps. If you want to be a great rider, you get a bike, ride a lot, and then continue to ride a lot to maintain your ability and stamina. To be someone who achieves your goals, you always have to be someone who works on them. That’s why you always have to keep them in your mind’s eye.

And you should never tell yourself that there’s a point where it all becomes easy. Again, I’m not trying to scare you, but I don’t want to lie to you. I want you ready for obstacles, including emotional obstacles like frustration that achieving your potential is persistently difficult. Working on your goals isn’t as hard as working in an 18th century coal mine, but it’s always going to take effort. It will always be easier to skip doing whatever tasks you have set for yourself and watch TV. So you have to keep in mind what your goals are and why you want them.

There can be a frustration that comes particularly from writing our goals so often. In work that takes years, there will be times when we only crawl forward, when we stagnate, or even when we move backward because of mistakes we’ve made or external circumstances. You might very well have life goals that you won’t be able to start for a decade. Repeatedly reminding yourself just how far you are from those goals—how far you always seem to be—will be disappointing at times, even discouraging. What’s the solution? Well, the simplest solution is not to do what I recommend here, but instead to put your goals out of your mind and just do whatever feels good at the moment. If you don’t think about your goals, they can’t disappoint you. Or rather they’ll disappoint you much more rarely—only when you can’t help but think about how far you are from having what you want. But of course you’re not here so you can live that kind of life. I hope that you agree with me that it’s better to face the frustration.

We’re just about done. Let’s do a quick review of the mantra that I introduced in What Is This Website: you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. You matter because you have value right now as you are—even before you have achieved the goals that you think are worthwhile. This work matters because you have value and so achieving the goals that will bring you a happier and more productive life also matters. It’s worth all of the effort that it will take. And you can do this work. You’re capable of thinking about what you want out of life, of creating five year goals, and of creating one year goals that guide your behaviors. And you’re capable of keeping them in your mind by writing them out twice a week. You can do it all that.

Thanks for sticking it out. See you next time.