Page 158 - Hard Goals

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that six-mile race, but it wasn’t super hard and I got a personal
best time. If this is my history, it’s safe to say that I pretty con-
sistently underset my goals.
I could do this with my company, where every year I say
we’re going to grow by 20 percent, and yet our actual yearly
growth is more like 30 percent. I could also do this with weight-
loss goals, savings goals, and so on. A lot of people underset
goals, and whether intentional or not, it’s like we’re “padding”
our goals. We can slack off a bit and still hit the original target
because we set that original target under what we are actually
capable of achieving (hence the label undersetter). Much of the
time you can even estimate a rough percentage by which you
underset your goals. In the company example, if I say we’ll grow
by 20 percent but we grow by 30 percent, and this happens
pretty regularly, I’d be consistently undersetting my goals such
that I’d need to increase my goals by 50 percent if I want them
to refl ect the reality of my actual achievements.
It works exactly the same with oversetting goals too. If I
consistently say I’ll run 10 miles and I get to 5 miles, or I say I’ll
save 12 percent a year but I really save 6 percent, or whatever,
then I’d be oversetting my goals such that I’d need to reduce
them by 50 percent if I want them to more closely approximate
reality.
The point is this: make your goals with as much precision as
you can, because you can’t scientifi cally tweak them if you don’t
begin with an accurate picture. If I’m a track coach and I’m
supposed to turn you into a world-class runner, I need to know
how fast you really run so I can design the proper workouts.
If you tell me, “I can run a fi ve-minute mile,” and I build your
workouts around that fi gure, you won’t make any real progress
if it turns out that you can actually run a four-minute mile.