Set goals you have complete control over

On the first day I started my business, I set a goal for the first month: get 1000 email subscribers.

Don’t do that!

You don’t have control over how other people react to your stuff, or whether they can even find it on the internet. Subscribers — and most things you want in your business — are a delayed reaction to your hard work, but making them your goal is toxic to your motivation.

You can’t control how many subscribers you get today. You can’t control whether you get promoted. You can’t control how many sales you make in your business.

I later hit that 1000 subscriber goal, but only 6 months later, and by that time I was pretty discouraged and moved on, shutting down the email list. I got way past that point in YouTube, but it took many months of waiting to get there, and even after not working on it for a year, my YouTube channel is doing better than ever, and I’ve long since stopped investing any effort in it. Especially with YouTube, blogging, and podcasting, it’s all delayed gratification — think of your effort as an investment that will lead to future subscribers for many years, but you may not see all that right now. You should still invest if you don’t see a return right away, but how to keep yourself motivated when feel like nobody cares? Trust that if you put out quality content and help people with something you really care about, they will find you. Set better goals and milestones to keep you going, and don’t worry if it’s not paying off in the vanity metrics just yet.

Putting a number of subscribers as my goal turned out to be very discouraging, and it’s not how I would recommend anyone do goal-setting. Instead, focus on what you have full control over. I had two goals that paid off in my business: 1) build software to make circos-plotting super easy — the most painful problem I could personally attempt to solve in the bioinformatics niche, and 2) put out a video on YouTube every single week. Unlike my “get 1000 subscribers” goal, those two goals were highly actionable, I could always tell if I was on the right track, and they involved no waiting and hoping whatsoever. Let’s set more good goals for ourselves and eliminate the bad ones so we don’t lose motivation every other day!

Turning a bad goal into a good goal

Let’s look at some more examples of good and bad goals:

Bad goals

• Make $100,000 your first year in business
• Get 1000 subscribers on your blog
• Get a promotion at work
• Lose 5 pounds
• Have a popular blog

Good goals

• Create and ship a software product
• Write a blog post every week
• Say yes to that scary new opportunity at work
• Eat vegetables with every meal
• Write a blog post every week about a pain in my industry

Something you do, not something you get (eventually).

If you ultimately want to make $X in sales or have X subscribers, then you have to start by intelligently setting a goal that you believe will get you there in the way that you feel best about. Do something that you will be proud of even if you don’t get your desired eventual payoff. If you do something icky to make money and then the money doesn’t come, then it’s truly a failure. But if you write several posts to help your audience, then it’s not a complete failure if it doesn’t make enough money. Since you don’t have control over the “what you get” goal, set a “what you do” goal you have complete control over and will be happy with even if that’s all you get. Then that is your new goal, you keep the outcome you wanted in mind but focus on doing the thing you need to get there. Stop looking at subscribers and focus on writing quality content and interacting with your audience. Also only set your “do” goals to things you care about, that way it’s not complete torture until it pays off, and you’re more likely to keep investing and eventually get more payoff when it comes.

Accomplishing your goals requires a lot of grit

Grit is all about continuing to work towards your goals and not giving up. It really helps to have grit if you want to succeed in life. But to avoid giving up on a goal, you have to have a goal you can actually reach — even if you’re not lucky, even if the universe is against you, even if you don’t go viral. In fact, set a goal that no amount of luck will just do for you. Set a goal that specifies the work required, as opposed to the outcome. Next time I’ll set the intention to “write a blog post every week” instead of “get 1000 subscribers”.

What can you do to bring your goals fully within your own control?