Yep, sounds very counter-intuitive. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always thought that in order to succeed you had to be ambitious and work harder than anyone else. But lately, I’ve been discovering, after reading a number of great posts like this one that the problem is that you can be very ambitious and enthusiastic and achieve very little.

I’m not being pessimistic here, I’m just acknowledging that I’m lazier than I think or would like to believe. The approach I’m taking instead is to focus on just a few important goals, rather than spreading myself thin across many goals (many of which are just not important). It has been very liberating, because the constraint of having just 1 or 2 goals makes you adjust everything you are doing so they relate to your goals. The other trick seems to be to do just enough towards each goal without overcommitting and getting burnt out. Harder than it sounds, because when you start you’re full of enthusiasm and want to do everything you can! Again this is another constraint, that instead of holding you back actually propels you forward.

So my goal setting strategy is to:

1. Have less of them – just 1 or 2
2. Do less towards them than you initially want to.

Doing less towards your goals prevents you from getting burnt out. It also lets you set a consistent pace towards your goal, because success takes a lot longer than you think. The point here is to build habit(s) that lead to your goal.

For example if your goal is to run 5km in 20 minutes by the end of the year, you first need to build the habit of running 5km on a regular basis. Instead of running every 2nd day, how about running just once a week? Sure you might be able to run 5km every 2nd day but how long will you keep that up before you burnout, stop running and eventually lose sight of your goal? Once you establish the run 5km once a week habit, you can then step up to the next habit that will get you closer to your goal.

This is such a shift in thinking about goal setting that it goes completely against anything I’ve been traditionally taught or told by experts. Note I’m not taking credit for any of this advice (which is the reason for all the links – please read the articles), as this is all information I’ve picked up from a number of great blogs.