It seems that everyone sets New Year’s Resolutions.  Well, more accurately, some people do, and some people like to feel superior to those that do by pointedly NOT doing it.  They argue that since most people don’t keep their resolutions, they’re saving time by not making any in the first place.

Alas, like many seemingly sound ideas, this one is half bunk.  Because resolutions have an impact even if they are not kept.

First, think of all the gyms that would have a 10% decrease in business if nobody signed up the first of the year, intending to really get in shape this time.  That would be a tragedy.  Kidding, of course, but there are some people – impossible to know what fraction – that really are going to keep going to the gym, or lose wight, or stop smoking, or what have you.  If they did not start, they wouldn’t continue.  But they do, and some keep going.  Every year there are those that really do make radical changes in their lives, and many of those changes start on January 1.

Second, on the negative side, there’s good evidence that making a resolution and not keeping it harms one’s sense of oneself.  It does violence to integrity.  Even if you are the only one that knows that you made the resolution, to break it reduces your commitment to yourself.  Therefore, as advice, please don’t frivolously make resolutions.  Don’t promise what you aren’t going to do.  It’s bad in business, and it’s bad in private.

An aside: this is one reason I have inveighed against goal-setting for so many years.  Most people “set goals”, but then either don’t expend the necessary effort to achieve them (reducing integrity) or expend too much effort to achieve them (screwing up priorities).  This leaves aside the even greater problem of people setting goals “looking out”, as my friend Jonathan Heaton says, instead of “looking in”.  Setting a goal to make $100,000 this year is great, but it’s very likely to be at least somewhat beyond your control, sort of like setting a goal to have it snow four inches (accomplished, BTW).  It would be better to set a goal to become the sort of person that is worth $100k per year, which is entirely in your control, and reinforces rather than weakens priorities.  But this is a topic for a much longer post.

Finally, though, and back on the positive side, those that make resolutions are at least aware that they need to improve, and willing to expend some effort to get themselves to do it.  That effort might be tiny indeed, no more than saying aloud to the general atmosphere, “I’m not going to speed down my street anymore.”  It might be followed by little or no real effort, which is bad, but the initial resolution, the original desire to change for the better, that has real power.  Those that use that power will find themselves strengthened and refreshed, regardless of what follows.

And those that use that power well, and discipline themselves to follow through, those people can become transformed.  I know.  It’s happened to me.

May it be so for all of us this year.

I have divided it up like this: on the one end, we have God, who does not set goals, because He always does exactly as He purposes.  On the other end we have a one-year-old.  One-year-olds do not set goals, either, because they can’t do it.  They have wishes, but if they cannot immediately satisfy them, they are incapable of changing their behavior to obtain the things they want eventually.  Goals are someplace in the middle, along with objectives, targets, plans, hopes and dreams.

Incidentally, before we get to far down this road, I have to say that one of the reasons I’m pursuing this is that I despise all this goal-setting crap I’ve been taught all my life, especially the “go-getter” trite phrases like “a goal you don’t write down is just a wish” or “set your goals high and don’t stop till you get there” and other such drivel.  I think – no, I am sure – that the vast majority of goal-setting motivational self-help (mostly well-intentioned) garbage has done as much to confuse and depress and distract people from what they should be doing as anything the world has ever known.  I just want that out there on the record.  The outwardly perky, inwardly desperate platitude-spouter is a proverb, and a sad commentary on how we’ve lost sight of what a truly happy life consists of.

Na.  Enough of that.  We forge on.  I have an example of what I mean about the uselessness of traditional definitions of goals.

My father doesn’t set goals.  Only two things he can remember that he wanted to do when he was a kid were sail on the Queen Mary and live in Virginia (he’s from Utah).  Check and check.  But this is a man that went from the late South High in Salt Lake, a kid whose father was a bus driver, and ended up with degrees from Columbia and Stanford and the University of Washington, a Masters in Education, and a distinguished and well-respected career on the right wing in Washington D.C.  He has seven children.  He’s still married to the same woman after 43 years.  He’s led dance bands, taught at colleges, toured the world making speeches, was once targeted by a well-known terrorist for assassination.  He did this without setting goals?  Really?

So this demands the question: what is a goal, anyway?  If it isn’t what all these books and motivational speakers tell you it is, then what is it?  Glad you asked.

Here’s my working definition: it’s something you want bad enough to change what you’re doing, or who you are, to get it.

That’s pretty broad.  I understand that.  I also understand that this violates the SMART concept of goal-setting (goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Rhapsodic and Time-Bound.  Okay, not rhapsodic, but you know what I mean).  But by the SMART definition my father never had a goal to perform Cox and Box, or play Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, or compete in the National Crossword Puzzle Championships, but I know he wanted to do those things and wanted to badly enough that he expended significant effort to make them happen (and he did them all).  That makes them goals, as far as I’m concerned.

I also know that this specifically excludes your specific, written New Year’s Resolution to make a million dollars this year.  I know, you really wanted to.  But what did you do to change so that you could become a person that could make that kind of money?  Anything?  I mean, anything real?  If you’re like me, you didn’t.  Just because you wrote it down doesn’t make it a goal.  And just because you didn’t write it down, if you nevertheless changed what you were doing so you could get it, then I think that’s evidence that it’s a goal.

This is slightly off the topic of how to SET goals, and what you do with yourself if you don’t reach them, but I think we have to take this step backward before we can make progress.  My general bent is not to proceed until I know that I’m going the right way, but in this case I’ve been moving forward and trying to do my best, understanding that I’m going to get better tools and more understanding as time goes on (you could help, incidentally, with comments).

As evidence I note a couple of things that I did the last two days to reach a goal of mine, that I would not have done had I not set the goal with a specific number (I’m talking here about production, mortgage loan production).  I might still have got the loans I inked, but I might not have, too.  Now I have them, because I set a goal that I would have a certain production this week.  That is just about the only reason I did what I did.

Experiences like this convince me that goals are important.  They make me better.  And I think they make me better even when they play into my character flaw of beating myself up when I don’t achieve them.

[Incidentally, this definition of a goal also removes my difficulty about God and whether He sets goals or not.  God doesn't change.  Therefore He has no need of goals.  Jesus Christ changed, but he never changed in His essential nature, that is, He was always doing His best at everything, and always doing what He was supposed to do.  He never needed to improve; He was perfect.  We, however, are imperfect, and we are frequently playing Free Cell when we are supposed to be calling clients.  We have need of goals.]

I still don’t really know how to set them well, or how much energy to invest in them, or all that.  And I’m still asking for your comments and suggestions.

Debate on Facebook about goal setting, reposting here with additional commentary because Facebook isn’t really a good forum for this kind of discussion.

I have a problem with goal setting.  Not that I don’t set them; I do.  Occasionally I even reach the goals I set, though that’s far from common.  No, my problem is figuring out whether or not I should set them.

Here’s my dilemma.  I am an intensely religious person, and I believe that God through His son Jesus Christ is my model for how to behave (a model I do not reach, let it be said).  God didn’t set a goal to create the world in seven days.  What God purposes, He does.  Now, it is true that God is omnipotent, so He can do all He means to do, and I am not, so sometimes I fail.  But if Christ is the model, and He didn’t set any goals, then what is it that I am to take from this?

I’ve been instructed by my religious leaders, as well as good men and women that I respect, to set goals.  The general instruction is to set goals that will require me to stretch, to improve, in order to reach them.  That means they are, almost by definition, goals I am not sure I can reach.  If I were sure I could reach them, they wouldn’t be a stretch.  I might think I can reach them, they might be projectably feasible based on past performance, but if I know for sure I can reach the goal, then I’m not stretching.

There is, however, one category of goal that this does not apply to.  These are goals that are commandments from God.  All of those are reachable by definition.  God cannot and would not give commands to His children for them to do things that they cannot do.  So if my goal is to draw closer to Christ, I can do that.  If my goal is to deepen my spiritual commitment, I can do it.  I know what I have to do to make those things happen.

But if my goal is to lose 10 pounds, there’s hardly a guarantee that I can do it.  Perhaps I can, perhaps I can’t.  Ultimately, obviously, I can lose the 10 pounds by having surgery to remove a kidney, but that brings in another difficulty for me, and that is, should I be setting conditional goals?  As in, should I set a goal that I’m going to lose 10 pounds, but only if I decide that I really want to more than I want to do something else?  That doesn’t sound effective to me.

So I guess I have several problems.  One is that I hate to lose.  Not reaching a goal sucks, and it sucks more than reaching it feels good.  Two is that I’m not sure that setting a goal in the first place is a good thing for me to do.  I find no great satisfaction in doing so.  Three is probably semantic – I do make long lists of things to do every day, and I guess you could call that a goal, but what I’m mostly trying to do is remember all the stuff I promised I’d get done, not set any specific target.  Would I perform better if I did put some targets on there?  Four is that I don’t think much of setting goals over things I can’t control.  Setting a goal to run a 5 minute mile is great, but even if I train all day every day under the tutelage of Sebastian Coe I might still not be able to get there.  It reminds me of setting a goal to have three straight days without rain.  Five is that setting a goal makes that goal disproportionately important to me, meaning that sometimes my priorities get out of wack.  Six is that if I insist on my priorities in the face of the goals I’ve set, I am by default saying that I have a goal to do thus and so, but only if I really want to.

And yet, I still set goals.  I don’t set many, but I do set some, and I hate myself if I don’t reach them.  That, at least, I recognize as a character flaw, and that if I’m unhappy only I am to blame for that.

But I’d still like some help.  What do you do?  What strategies do you use that help you become a better person?  Do you reward yourself?  How do you do that?  Are your goals 1-0 (yes I got it/no I didn’t), or scalable (got most of the way there)?  How do you deal with losing?