Page 12 - Hard Goals

Introduction 3

your personal fi nances: there’s a goal for that. If you want to
reform the world’s fi nancial system, avoid oil spills, shrink defi -
cits, and accelerate the world’s economies: there are goals for all
those things too.
But much like the iPhone made us rethink the phone, so
too will HARD Goals make us rethink goals. These aren’t your
typical goals. In fact, extraordinary goals are so different from
the average person’s goals that it’s almost criminal to use the
word goal to describe them both. The kinds of goals that lead to
iPads, marathons, fi nancial freedom, and weight loss stimulate
the brain in profoundly different ways than the goals most people
set. In nearly all cases where greatness is achieved, it’s the goal
that drives motivation and discipline—not the other way around.

IT’S MORE THAN JUST HAVING GOALS

Almost everyone has set a goal or two in his or her life. Every
year more than 50 percent of people make New Year’s resolu-
tions to lose weight, quit smoking, work out, save money, and so
on. A majority of employees working for large companies par-
ticipate in some kind of annual corporate and individual goal-
setting process. Virtually every corporate executive on earth has
formal goals, scorecards, visions, and the like. And who among
us hasn’t fantasized about having more money, a better body,
more success at work, a swankier house, and so forth? All of
these are goals.
And yet, notwithstanding the ubiquity of goals, many of us
never achieve our goals. And the goals we do achieve often fall
far short of extraordinary.