Audacious Goals and How to Find Them.
What are your audacious goals?
Twitter is a place for ideas. I generally find a treasure trove of concepts here and recently, I came across this post by Gaurav Munjal Cofounder and CEO, Unacademy, India's largest online learning app, on his productivity stack and the concept of ‘Iconic Goals’. According to Munjal, it is these goals that set the foundation for execution, thinking big and long-term. A look at Munjal’s goals and I could not help but be inspired and in awe.
It even struck me that perhaps such goals only come to you when you are a Founder, building a billion dollar company (and no less). Munjal is not the only one with audacious goals, take a look at a timeline of Elon Musk’s goals and everything he wants to achieve by 2030, Jeff Bezos’s Master Plans or Mark Zuckerberg’s 2030 goals.
Immediately after reading this post, at least twice, I sat down to think of my own ‘Iconic Goals’ after much evasion. I tried every tactic of pretending to be busy and made up several tasks and finally ran out of things to do. It was at this moment I realised how scared, worried and anxious I was. I wanted to know why goal setting is so difficult and chanced upon this.
“According to the research of psychologists, neurologists, and other scientists, setting a goal invests ourselves into the target as if we’d already accomplished it. That is, by setting something as a goal, however small or large, however near or far in the future, a part of our brain believes that desired outcome is an essential part of who we are – setting up the conditions that drive us to work towards the goals to fulfil the brain’s self-image.
Apparently, the brain cannot distinguish between things we want and things we have. Neurologically, then, our brains treat the failure to achieve our goal the same way as it treats the loss of a valued possession. And up until the moment, the goal is achieved, we have failed to achieve it, setting up a constant tension that the brain seeks to resolve.
Ideally, this tension is resolved by driving us towards accomplishment. In many cases, though, the brain simply responds to the loss, causing us to feel fear, anxiety, even anguish, depending on the value of the as-yet-unattained goal.”
But, my issue was not only about goal-setting as an exercise as explained above. It was also this:
I do not have ‘Iconic Goals’
Even if I use the last of my neurotransmitters I would be unable to match any goal that Munjal has set himself to achieve
Therefore, I am mediocre and cannot think big
But since we cannot wallow in self-pity for too long, I decided to ask a bunch of my friends what their ‘audacious goals’ are. They read something like this:
I want a personal masseuse at my beck and call
A robot that can cook
Peace and a beach house
Honestly at that moment, I heaved a sigh of relief only because my own goals did not look very different. My own goals read something like this:
Making a positive impact on every second person I meet
Mentor at least 100 youngsters to find their dream careers
Make every word I write matter and that would be my legacy
I could not stop at that. I had to overcome my feeling of mediocrity. I slept on this for a few days and have finally developed a framework to imagine my life goals and it reads something like this:
Pay-check and finance goals: how can I make more money and optimise for time?
Passion goals: what side hustles (that I cannot do at work) will enhance my personality and learning curve?
Value and giving-back goals: who needs my help most/ where can I add value that reflects in shifting an outcome to make it better.
In their book, ‘Designing Your Life,’ Bill Burnett and Dave Evans propose the following framework (which is not very different from how I had thought of my own:)
Work: The stuff you do to get paid.
Play: Any activity that brings you joy when you do it.
Love: The quality of the people and relationships in your life.
Health: The health state of your mind, body, and spirit.
Financial: The state of your monetary health.
Source: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
Alternatively there are some other frameworks that can help create goals as well.
The Bill Gates’ OKR method based on the book, Measure What Matters by John Doerr (this method is also used by Google Founders) and was discovered by Doerr in 1970 as an engineer at Intel. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame.
Zig Ziglar’s Seven Steps of Goal Setting: Create Better Goals - Identify the goal, list the benefits, list the obstacles, list the skills and knowledge required, list the people or projects to work with, create an action plan, set a deadline.
During this exercise, I also realised something about goals:
They change with time and life situations
Not every goal can be measured (sometimes they are just a small behavioural change that you have been unable to make for a very long time)
They are highly personal and should never be compared
They should make an incremental difference to life and self-esteem
Multiple frameworks exist, it is best to adopt what suits you best
After having broken this down for myself, I can now say that goal setting is a process I am not uncomfortable with and value my mediocrity. My goals have not changed even after developing the framework, so I look forward to Munjal sharing how he has arrived at his ‘Iconic Goals’ that I call ‘Audacious Goals’ or should I just be content and believe in my own audacity? For now, I will settle with this statement from Julian Shapiro’s latest essay on ‘vanity metrics’, “Don't inherit goals without challenging them.”
Do you have audacious goals or a goal setting framework you would like to share?
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Such a lovely read Nisha! Great going!