Page 79 - Hard Goals

70 HARD Goals

receiving that promotion you’re after. What about hugging your
friends as you cross the marathon fi nish line? Can you feel that
hard-earned sweat pouring down your back? How about visu-
alizing the post-race carb-loaded meal you can’t wait to order
from your favorite restaurant and chow down on? Or perhaps
your goal is retirement in Boca. Can you feel the green grass
beneath your feet and take in the amazing smell coming from
that gardenia bush over there? How does it make you feel on
an emotional level to realize that, from here on in, your time is
100 percent yours?
Whatever you intend to achieve with your goal, animate it,
right down to the minute details. If your goal is to double your
company’s market share, maybe you’ll picture . . . Well, huh,
that’s a tough one. And here you can start to see a problem with
a lot of goals. Too many goals, especially those in the corpo-
rate or fi nancial realms, are too abstract to turn into a picture.
And that’s a major problem, given that I’ve just spent several
pages showing you all this great research about how we need
to visualize.

THE NEED FOR SPECIFICITY

In the business world especially, much gets made of the need to
have highly specifi c goals, and I couldn’t agree more. The prob-
lem is that when a lot of people talk about specifi city, what they
really mean is that the goal needs to be described as a number.
And I’m sorry to say that if you don’t fi rst start with a picture,
those numbers will provide a very false sense of specifi city.