Why We Fail To Reach Our Goals And How To Design Them For Success
I have failed to reach my goals all my life and still fail. But I am much happier with my current process. I use the design approach — experiment, observe and learn rather than fixate on the outcome.
A bottom-up approach will make your goal-setting a continuous process and take some of the stress out.
There are 3 components to our goals
- What we want to achieve, e.g., eat healthily
- What is our strategy, e.g., eat more balanced with calories in and out
- What should we do every day, e.g., eat more veggies
The first two steps are easy. Mapping outcomes to daily routines and sticking to them is where we fail.
Why?
A good routine must be effortless — simple, fixed, and done in a fixed number of known steps. So, routines are a routine — boring and easy to skip. Setting big audacious goals is exciting but inching every day towards them is not so exciting.
The Power of Routines
Something ground-breaking happened when I first flipped the goal-setting process by designing my daily routines. Without knowing the outcome, I decided to walk every day for 30 minutes. When my Fitbit showed me 2.4 million steps completed, I felt the power of a routine. Imagine setting a goal of walking 1000 miles a year. I would have never achieved these results. Instead of helping me, my brain would have sabotaged my effort in 1000 ways. But waking up in the morning, putting my shoes and earphones on, strolling in my neighborhood for 30 minutes while I listened to my favorite books kept my brain engaged.
Start-and-stop is the enemy of compounding. Remember the tortoise and hare? No amount of heroic efforts will catch up to compounding. The small effortless steps breed consistency. My inspiration for the routine design comes from BJ Fog’s Tiny habits.
Create Levers with Compound Routines
When I write my yearly goals, I end up with a two-pager. I get super ambitious. You name it, and I have it on my list, including space travel. There is no penalty to add a goal. Instead, we get rewarded with a “rush,” as if we achieved it. A very satisfying feeling that handicaps us.
All our goals need changing our current habits. And change is hard and limits how many goals we can set. When you decide to walk, you have to wake up early. When you signup to complete a marathon, you need to train for 3–5 hours a week. That exciting two-pager at the beginning of the year stares at me, causing daily stress.
By choosing overlapping goals and avoiding conflicting goals, you can design the amount of change required. I start with a seed routine and build compounding routines around it, e.g., combine morning mindfulness, creativity, and learning with walking. I use the California sunrises and the morning warmth to overwhelm me with gratitude and mindfulness. My 1000s of sunrise pictures collection helped me create color palates for my designs. My 30-minutes audible adds up to 4 courses a year.
Ritualize Sweating the Small Stuff
I explore ways to protect my routine, rain or shine. Each day is different. Some days I have to push mentally, and other days physically. I live for those effortless days that make me feel I am born for it, and I get to push myself beyond my regular routine. My inspiration comes from Adm. William McRaven’s “Make your bed” speech. This life-changing habit of sweating small stuff perpetuates my routines. Attention to the details keeps us present and builds joy, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation to fuel the flywheel.
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, talks about identity-based goals and building systems. We become what you routinely do. As he said, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems”. Routines and rituals created the most powerful compounding system for me.
TLDR;
Routines are fundamental building blocks of our goal-setting systems. When we start with routines, we can set better goals.
We get to “do” goals rather than “set” them.
May you enjoy your goal-achieving :)
