(When I thought about what I wanted to address and clarify, I expected “Goals” to an easy one. Marching off straight down the clear road toward the “idea” of goals, I was surprised to almost immediately find myself in a swamp of philosophical proportions! I quickly retreated onto little quotable islands of platitudes and truisms until, someday, I may feel brave enough to venture in again.)
Accepting that Strategy can be organized into three components — Resources, Allocation, or how we choose to use our resources, and Goals — we can probably agree that Goals are the driver of the whole process.
If strategy is about “getting somewhere,” it’s important to know where “there” is. If strategy is about the best way to climb the mountain, we need to know where the peak is.
All strategy is dependent on the existence of a goal — the desired outcome. This seems self-evident, yet for something so obvious it may be where the greatest weakness in strategy occurs.
So, sure, defining a goal is important. That’s why so many people have addressed this. Here’s just a few examples:
“Cat: Where are you going?
Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don’t know.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”
― Seneca the Younger
Or from the sage of baseball:
“If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.”
― Yogi Berra
But, this is not to imply that defining a goal, or keeping focused on it is easy. Our overarching goal may get ignored when our attention is drawn to something less important, but more “urgent.”
“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”
— Peter Drucker
Or events may overtake us. Heading off into the forest with the goal to hunt for supper gets dumped pretty fast if you find there is a pack of wolves on your trail.
More commonly, we may have too many goals and they may conflict with each other, even cancelling each other out. All the vectors may resolve into a plate of spaghetti.
Like the famous traditional nesting Russian dolls, one’s goals for today hopefully fit within the goals for the week and the year . . . The truth is that smaller, more immediate goals are usually much easier to focus upon and achieve.
“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
This is great, except that the smaller goals may never line up on where you ultimately want to get to. Ideally, we can focus on an immediate goal that remains aligned with our bigger, or even greatest, goals.
“To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. . . . But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides. So on we go—we have a long way—no hurry—just one step after the next.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
When I find myself quoting truisms, I begin to suspect something else is going on. Trying to scribble these notes is bringing home the realization that “setting goals” can range from the prosaic to the metaphysical. Any thoughts about goal setting rely greatly upon context and scale. Setting a goal to become a doctor is clear. But if that goal is in support of the goal gaining someone’s respect, that is suddenly a lot more complicated.
In general, the smaller, the more immediate, the more tangible, and the more focused the goal, the easier it is to get proceed. The challenge becomes greater as the scale and importance of the goal increase.
For a positive, tangible example, I will refer to the precedent of the Wright brothers, whose greatest achievement was possibly less about doing what had been considered impossible — inventing a functional airplane — and more about their process in getting there:
“Wilbur was a man who established a goal with care, then never lost sight of it. He was the perfect engineer — isolating a basic problem, defining it in the most precise terms, and identifying the missing bits of information that would enable him to solve it. Other students of the subject lost themselves in a welter of confusing detail; they were lured into extraneous, if fascinating blind alleys that led away from the basic problem. He had the capacity to recognize and the dogged determination required to cut straight to the heart of any matter.”
— The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright - Tom Crouch
In the end, some goals, like personal life goals, are open-ended. It seems the bigger and “deeper” the goal, the more difficult it is to define. Avoiding the “spiritual” for now, the simplest takeaway would be to try to define the scope of the context first — preferably something manageable . . . and “specific.”
“When I was growing up I always wanted to be someone. Now I realize I should have been more specific.”
― Lily Tomlin