You Will Never Achieve Your SMART Goals
By: Luca Rossi
Tags: Work, Goals, Management, Productivity, Self Improvement

You Should Still Set Goals, But Make Them SIMPLE

Image by Robert Armstrong from Pixabay

In this story, we have explored some of the flaws of SMART goals. There’s a lot of research if you aren’t convinced yet.

Some good alternatives have been proposed, like FAST goals and HARD goals.

I prefer SIMPLE goals. Actually, I would rather avoid setting goals altogether. But setting goals is part of human nature, so we can’t just stop doing that.

SIMPLE goals are described by the following 6 properties. They don’t have to satisfy all of them, but the more the better.

Some SIMPLE properties overlap with SMART properties but there are fundamental differences. In general, SMART properties not only are not required, but you are also encouraged to ignore them.

The major difference between the two is that, while SMART properties increase your chances of reaching a given goal, SIMPLE properties are based on the assumption that you may not reach your goal, so they increase your future opportunities.

Also notice that, in some cases, a SMART goal can be easily turned into a SIMPLE goal just by framing it, i.e. the goal stays the same, but you see it from a different perspective. Psychology plays a big role in the chances of achieving a goal.

S — Serendipitous

A serendipitous goal exposes you to several possibilities of pivoting to better goals that you wouldn’t normally consider.

Serendipity is what happens when you unexpectedly find something good while you are looking for something else.

With SIMPLE goals the means are more important than the ends. You may change your mind about your ends, so your means should also provide something that is outside of the scope of the goal itself.

In some ways, this property can be partially seen as the opposite of the Specific property of SMART goals.

The point of serendipitous goals is to give you more chances to experience serendipity. Once you get your serendipitous moment, you should be able to effortlessly pivot to a better goal.

The classic example is scientific research. Maybe your goal is to find a cure for cancer. In doing so, you accidentally find a potential cure for diabetes.

Should you throw your work away because you didn’t find what you were looking for? No, you change your goal and shift to diabetes research.

The S could also stand for Scalable. A scalable goal yields results with no theoretical upper limit.

Scalability is not a necessary property, but you can expect significant results when you combine serendipity and scalability. The perfect example is launching a startup.

A startup is a scalable company: it usually starts small, but its business model can be replicated on larger scales, with no theoretical upper limit to the amount of money it can make.

When I did it, I experienced serendipity several times. I completely transformed the startup by pivoting when I met new opportunities. I didn’t succeed, but neither would I have if I stuck with my original goal.

If you find the right opportunity, you can scale it up to a point that it largely makes up for the cost of the failed opportunities.

How to tell if a goal is serendipitous? In general, a serendipitous goal:

Involves creativity. There can’t be serendipity without creative thinking.

There can’t be serendipity without creative thinking. Involves networking. Each person you meet is a potential door to new opportunities.

Each person you meet is a potential door to new opportunities. Requires multiple skills. This means that the goal is not trivial, and new opportunities can arise from it.

If your goal is to learn how to fly an airplane, it’s a wonderful goal, but it’s not serendipitous nor scalable. I’m not saying that learning how to fly an airplane is a bad idea, but it doesn’t have this property.

I encourage you to do it if you like it. Otherwise, I would think twice about it.

I — Instrumental

An instrumental goal is a goal that makes it easier to achieve almost any other goal.

Classic examples are the goals of getting more money, learning evergreen skills like soft skills, having a good routine including habits like meditating and working out, or seeing a therapist to improve your mental health.

For example, if you are an engineering student, improving your math skills and logical thinking will make it easier to pass almost every exam. The fact that I studied more math than I needed is probably one of the reasons why my university career was so smooth.

Instrumental goals are useful to create new opportunities. Like in any open-ended algorithm, a high number of opportunities can lead to better outcomes.

M — Minimal

A minimal goal requires a small amount of time and resources to generate feedback.

Imagine that I decided to start working right away on my long-term goal of creating an Artificial General Intelligence.

There is no way to know how close I actually am to achieve this goal at any given time. I would probably get discouraged, or worse, work on the wrong problem for the whole time.

Creating an app is easier than creating an AGI, but it’s still a very long task. Even the simplest apps can take weeks to develop (at least the useful ones).

Without any external feedback, it’s easy to start having doubts before reaching the conclusion of the project.

Writing on Medium gives me very fast feedback. It takes me 2 to 7 days to write an article, and the feedback (in terms of claps) is almost immediate after I publish it.

This makes it easy for me to write consistently. In my 3 and half months on Medium, I wrote more than 100,000 words. That’s the equivalent of a book. If I had planned to write an actual book in 3 months and only in my free time, I would have given up at some point.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t have goals like developing an app or writing a book. But you need to find ways to get feedback early on a Minimum Viable Product or a chapter draft, instead of waiting for the conclusion of the whole project.

P — Process-oriented

A process-oriented goal focuses on outputs rather than outcomes, like daily habits.

You can just focus on habits without even creating goals. Goals tend to generate stress and anxiety. Technically, a truly process-oriented goal isn’t even a goal.

For example, I never set goals for my Medium blog. I never planned to write 100,000 words in 3 months. I just have the habit of writing every day. That’s it. And, without even realizing it, I wrote a book in the process.

Focus on the writing, not on the book. Have the practice of writing a minimum number of words or for a minimum amount of time every day.

This is partially related to the Measurable property of SMART goals. But you should measure outputs rather than outcomes. Outputs are what you do (number of words you write), outcomes are what you get (number of people who read it). You should also avoid measuring goal-related outputs, like the percentage of the project that you have completed.

A daily workout, a daily journaling session, a daily healthy meal, a daily deep work session, a daily random act of kindness, all these things can do more for you than your static abstract goals.

L — Low-commitment

A low-commitment goal does not preclude the possibility of reaching other goals.

This point isn’t always obvious. Some goals, when started, make it more difficult to reach other goals in the future.

An obvious example could be the following. Let’s say that your goal is to become a pornstar. You achieve your goal and you are happy for a while, then you decide that you want something more from life and quit.

Your life choices are now severely limited. It will be more difficult to find a partner for a serious relationship. Companies won’t take you seriously, the only viable careers are those related to sex or acting.

It’s not impossible to have a normal life, but it’s way more difficult, especially if you are a woman.

This can be seen as an extreme example, but there others that are less obvious.

Let’s say that you want to be a biotech entrepreneur. Before doing that, you decide to work for a couple of years for another biotech company, so you can learn more about the field.

When you are ready to leave the company, according to your contract, you have to sign an NDA and can’t work for a direct competitor or start a biotech company for the next 5 years. Oops…

Some goals set a path for you that, once you are in, it’s difficult to leave. I’m not saying to avoid those goals, but take into account the possibility that you may want to explore different options at some point.

The whole point of SIMPLE goals is to be resilient to changes in external factors. If you can’t change your goals easily, it would be better to stick with SMART goals.

E — Effortless

An effortless goal requires way less effort than the outcome it produces.

I don’t mean it literally, because no goal is really effortless. Some effort is obviously required, but it should be disproportionately lower than the outcome.

I also refer to effort in a subjective sense. For example, we would all agree that doing a Ph.D. is not effortless. But if you, like me, enjoy research to the point that you don’t mind the effort, it’s probably a good idea to pursue it.

This is a very subtle concept. For example, if you are a coder, you may spend hours trying to fix a bug. This is not effortless in the literal sense, you may be psychologically exhausted.

But when you fix it, you may feel a sense of satisfaction that completely makes up for the exhaustion. If you are able to crave that feeling, you can consider your goal effortless.