Page 13 - Hard Goals

4 HARD Goals

My company, Leadership IQ, recently studied 4,182 workers
from virtually every industry to learn about their goals at work.
What we discovered might not shock you, but it will probably
dismay and disturb you: only 15 percent of people believed that
their goals for this year were going to help them achieve great
things. And only 13 percent thought their goals would help
them maximize their full potential.
How can this be? There’s copious self-help literature that tells
us if we write down our goals, our dreams will come true. Cor-
porations have formal goal-setting systems, like SMART Goals,
to help employees develop and track their goals. And we’ve practi-
cally institutionalized New Year’s resolutions. There’s no shortage
of goals in this world. So why aren’t we all “blowing the doors
off” every day? The short answer is that most of our goals aren’t
worth the paper they’re printed on (or the pixels that display
them).

WHAT DO STEVE JOBS AND A THREE-
YEAR-OLD HAVE IN COMMON?

Let me show you the inadequacy of our goals via a weird ques-
tion: What do Steve Jobs and a three-year-old have in common?
I know, it’s a bizarre question and at fi rst glance it doesn’t seem
like they have anything in common. But dig a little deeper, and it
turns out that their goals are pretty similar. Oh sure, Steve Jobs
wants to reinvent entire industries with his iPad and iPhone and
iWhatever-comes-next, and that three-year-old probably just
wants the cookie sitting on the counter. But mentally, they’re