Page 159 - Hard Goals

150 HARD Goals

This kind of sandbagging happens all the time, and business
processes are prime examples (budgets, order fulfi llment, time
lines, and the like). Do you know the phrase “underpromise
and overdeliver”? Well, that’s exactly what I’m talking about;
it sounds good, but it’s really just undersetting our goals. And
it just destroys our ability to use a more scientifi c goal-setting
process to get the kinds of results we’re all dying to see.
In the next step, we’re going to take this newly accurate
goal and subject it to two simple questions: what am I going to
learn from this goal, and how do I feel about this goal? For the
fi rst question, ask yourself, “How is this goal going to stretch
me?” More specifi cally, what will you have to learn to achieve
your goal? How will you grow as a person as a result of your
goal? What new skills will you have acquired by virtue of pur-
suing your goal? If you remember our earlier discussion about
performance versus learning goals, I said that even when a goal
is a performance goal, you should still be learning all sorts of
wonderful things. And that’s exactly what we’re testing here.
An appropriately diffi cult goal, one that puts you right in
that sweet spot of diffi culty, is going to require you to learn.
It’s going to stretch your brain, excite some neurons, amp you
up, and awaken your senses. If you can breeze through a goal
without learning, it’s just not diffi cult enough. So how much
learning is enough learning? Well, go back to the very begin-
ning of the chapter when I asked you to describe your greatest
personal accomplishments and use that as your measuring stick.
You need to be learning about that much for this goal. Another
way to think about this is that a goal has the right level of diffi -
culty when you’re going to have two to four major new learning
experiences from it.