The Big Goal

The Big Goals Part 2

Just as we alluded to in the Big Goals original posting, when you state your goals in the SMART way, you have a scientific approach to achieving your goals. However there is the artistic side of setting a big goal that needs to be incorporated into the process. The artistic portion has to do with your inner motivation and personal values. It answers the question what do you want? by achieving this Big Goal.

In our previous example, we had set the goal of reading for one hour per day five days per week. In this example we didn’t specify; What do you want to read? Why do you want to read? What will you gain from this reading? So we set the SMART goal however we didn’t address the artistic side of the Big Goal. There are a wide variety of book genre’s to look at, fiction, self-help, finance, technology and leadership, just to name a few. Now comes the hard part, you will need to set the specific books you would like to read. You will choose five (5) books that would top your list and set the Big Goal to read them. Since we don’t know how fast we will read the books, we can’t specify an end date. However, our goal is one hour per day for five days per week, therefore we have set aside the time to complete the goal. We aren’t setting an end date on this goal so we can work until we achieve it and that will be fast enough. We have amended our goal to: I want to read these five (5) books for an hour a day for five (5) days per week. We are incorporating the artistic and SMART processes together to get our amended Big Goal.

Remember there is a difference between personal big goals and work big goals. In the work environment, there are many deadlines and rigidness to the goals at hand. While we can still incorporate the SMART and artistic goal setting process, we must remember that deadlines at work must be met and accommodate for these.

For both work and personal goals, the main thing to remember is to break it down into small pieces (an hour 5 days per week) and celebrate your small successes. When you think about Big Goals in this manner it will keep you focused and relieve some of the overwhelming stresses that usually coincide with Big Goals. It’s okay to enjoy the work to achieve success and its okay to leave a little thirsty for more every day. A great way to think of a Big Goal is that it is just a bunch of small goals sequenced together to achieve success.