Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 4 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Setting goals with PICS
— From The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business by Josh Kaufman
As we near the end of the year, the mad rush to achieve our goals begins. We have to meet Q4 goals and quotas, we want to accomplish those things that we said we would do back in January but put off until now, etc.
What happened?
Very likely, what happened is that we set vague goals.
Josh Kaufman, business guru and author of The Personal MBA, says “Well-formed goals accomplish two things: they help you visualize what you want, and make you excited about achieving it.”
Fuzzy goals like: “I want to climb a mountain” aren’t very helpful, because they don’t give your brain anything to work with. Which mountain? Where? When? Why? Without answers to these questions, you probably won’t do anything at all.
Well-formed goals pass the “Everest Test.” Useful goals look like this: “I want to climb to the summit of Mt. Everest before my fortieth birthday, and take a panoramic picture to frame on my wall as a trophy.”
In this example, this goal would be easy for your brain to envision: Arranging travel to Nepal, improving your climbing skills, searching for a guide, purchasing gear and equipment, buying a panoramic camera, and so on.
Kaufman goes on to say, “Once you make a conscious choice to achieve the goal, your mind automatically starts finding ways to get it done.”
So, what do we need to set well-formed goals that we can achieve?
Kaufman suggests framing the goals in a Positive, Immediate, Concrete, Specific (PICS) format:
Positive: “Refers to Motivation: your goal should be something you move toward, not away from.” If you have a goal like “I don’t want to be fat anymore,” the author says, “You’re reinforcing the negative instead of [changing] your mind’s prediction to get excited about improving.”
Immediate: “Refers to time-scale: your goals should be things that you decide to make progress on now, not ‘someday’ or ‘eventually.’ If you don’t want to commit to working on a particular goal now, put it on your someday/maybe list and focus on something else.”
Concrete: “Means you’re able to see the results in the real world. Goals are achievements—you should know when you’ve accomplished what you set out to achieve. Setting goals like ‘I want to be happy’ don’t work because they’re not concrete—how would you know when you’re done? When you reach the top of Mt. Everest, you’ve achieved something concrete.”
Specific: “Means you’re able to define exactly what, when, and where you’re going to achieve your goal. Climbing Mt. Everest on a certain date in the near future is specific, which makes it easy for your mind to plan exactly how you’ll go about accomplishing it.”
While all of this is very important to set goals, the part that I find even more important is when the author explains, “For best effect, your goals should be under your control. Goals like ‘Losing twenty pounds’ are soul-crushing because they’re not directly under your control—losing weight is a result, not an effort. If your weight randomly moves up a few pounds on a given day, it’s easy to feel defeated, even though you had no choice in the matter… make your goals actions that are within your [control], like thirty minutes of exercise every day and controlling the number of calories you consume.”
Keep track of your goals using whatever system works for you, whether manually or electronically. There are myriad ways to do this: the simpler, the better.
Lastly, Kaufman also reminds us that “it’s perfectly okay to change your goals. Sometimes we think we want something, only to find out later that we don’t want it so much anymore. Don’t feel bad about that—it’s called learning. If you find yourself working toward a goal you no longer feel good about, work on something else.”
And now, I will let you go work on framing your goals for the rest of the year. What are you planning to do? Let me know in the comments here, I’d love to hear what you’re up to.
ACTION
TODAY: What are you looking to achieve during the last two months of this year? November is almost here. Take some time to reframe your goals using PICS to ensure you can achieve them. If your goals are too big, break them down into subgoals that you can indeed achieve in 60 days.
FUTURE: Kaufman asks, “If you haven’t, can you set an arbitrary end state for now, leaving yourself open to course-correction as you progress?” As we move along on our goals, we learn and we course-correct all the time. Be disciplined with your actions to make your goal happen; but be flexible as time goes by and you course-correct (based on your experience of working on your goal), that way you can reach your destination sooner, faster, better, etc.
Know someone who is going trying to achieve a goal in the last 2 months of the year? Please share this post with them! Email, Facebook or Twitter.