Too Many folks are pushing the idea of SMART Goals. Here we want to emphasize that they are fine for short term goals for employee performance issues. But they are not smart for your creative or your long term visionaries. If you want breakthrough success or excellence, you need something more.

Thomas:     Welcome to another episode of Life Unsettled – New Path, Better Future. Today we’re going to follow up on something that we talked a little bit about before, and that is goals. What got me started on this was, as we talked about setting goals and motivating yourself for goals, etc., we have out there hanging out in the wind how to set up your own goals.

A key thing that you hear in a lot of corporations are smart goals. Quite frankly, to me, smart goals are kind of dumb. That is: they’re useful, but they’re really not great goals for you to have. Let’s look at what they are. They are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant or realistic, and time-bound (that means that there’s some set time that you will get them done by.)

Specific and measurable, those are nice things to have, specific, but what are they that are far-reaching? When you say specific, measurable, achievable, they’re really something that you’re sure you can do. No qualifier on it. It’s actually almost like a milestone; it’s not life-changing.

Generally, these are things that you would think of as that you can definitely get this done. For example, they’re small. I can lose 10 pounds by the end of February or the end of March. I can reduce my costs or increase my productivity by a specific amount, say 10%. They’re nice, they’re uplifting, etc., but they’re milestones. They are, in a sense, little things that you would have on a performance chart to say: “Okay, I got these accomplished during this year or these six months.”

What I want to do is talk about, instead, set goals that are life changing. Set goals that you really want to achieve something. For example, some of the things that I’ve done that I couldn’t have put in this kind of term. I could maybe generally. One was learning Japanese. Going back to college, to Hofstra. I wanted to get and do well enough to be able to get into a top school. What that school would be, I had no idea, but I knew that it was a stepping stone, in a sense, a milestone to getting into the best graduate school that I could.

Lo and behold, then I get admitted to Berkeley. With the PhD in mathematical and statistical economics, there was still another goal there actually to get through and complete that. When I went to the research labs at General Motors, I had goals to do certain things, but they were again milestones.

In each of these things that I had as goals, I had specific paths that I didn’t know exactly what the path was, but I had a general path on what I would need to do to get through to that. When I was in Hofstra, what was it? Taking certain courses. It was important to take certain courses, and it was also important to get A’s. What percent of what course, what to do, those things were not as clearly defined as was the length of time it might take. As it turns out, it doesn’t take much.

Going into Berkeley, when I got there, you expect a graduate degree to take four years. Find out that the actual student is actually completing the PhD in 6.4 years, and that in order to really do well, I needed to go over and also take a lot of math and statistical courses, and go through the master’s program and statistics. At least the course where that is.

Goals, in essence, true, life-changing goals are going to be things that you’re going to adjust the path on the way. Think in terms of when they decided they were going to put a man on the moon. They didn’t know exactly what they were going to do or how they were going to get it done. They had to literally invent certain things to complete that goal, that monumental goal. Yes, they said: “We’re going to put a man on the moon by the end of the dec...