Page 160 - Hard Goals

Difficult 151

What if your goal isn’t going to generate that level of learn-
ing and growth? That’s a sign that you need to make your goal
about 30 percent more diffi cult. Given that we took the sand-
bagging out of our goals, making a goal 30 percent more dif-
fi cult is usually enough to get our brain excited and start those
neurons fi ring. And of course, if you still need more diffi culty,
take it up another 30 percent. Just don’t start arbitrarily tripling
or quadrupling the diffi culty of your goal, because that can very
quickly take it from optimally diffi cult to just plain impossible.
Kevin Andrews is the president of SmartBen, a software
company that developed a cutting-edge platform for benefi t
administration and employee self-service. Every human resources
executive in the world knows of the company, but in layman’s
terms, it delivers a Web-based platform whereby the employees
of a company can view and manage their salary, benefi ts, retire-
ment planning, and more. Now, that’s all well and good, but
it’s not what makes Kevin and his company interesting. What
makes them worth talking about is what happened when they
got too successful.
SmartBen’s client roster reads like the Fortune 500, and the
company is brilliantly run (in other words, it’s very profi table).
But after several years of being in business, the company’s lead-
ers didn’t have the same electric buzz that they did when their
company was a start-up. To hear Kevin tell it, “I felt like we
were stagnating. Yes, we were fi nancially successful and our
clients were happy, but we felt a bit fl at. I’d come into work
without much enthusiasm and leave the same way. My brain just
wasn’t getting switched on at work.”
So one day Kevin was on a plane and picked up a scientifi c
magazine a previous passenger had left in the seat pocket. It was