Productive Entrepreneur-Day 2 No More Goals

You’ve probably been told that in order to be productive, you should set goals. Big goals. S.M.A.R.T. goals. Stretch goals.

The thinking goes that in order to achieve anything meaningful, you need to turn it into a goal.

Well… maybe.
While goals can be really helpful, they aren’t always ideal.

The Problem with Goals

Goals have one big problem: they have a termination point.

In other words, you’re not successful until you’ve actually reached your goal, and until you’ve reached the goal you might feel like:

• You’re spinning your wheels, not going anywhere.
• You’re a failure.
• You haven’t achieved anything since the goal seems so distant.
• Measuring success this way can make you feel defeated, especially if you have big, ambitious goals.
• For example, if you want to own a Fortune 500 hundred company, nothing you do until you reach that goal will make you feel like you’re succeeding. You may be making incredible strides in your business, but they will fall flat compared to your hard-to-achieve goal.

Since goals have an “end”, you never feel like a success until you’ve actually achieved your goal. And even when you achieve your goal, you simply have to start all over again with the next goal.

And the reality is, you might not even know what the “next” goal should be. So, you feel aimless. You know you should be seeking to accomplish something, but you’re not sure what that something should be.

Even worse, you might feel like since you already accomplished your goal you can go back to your old habits instead of pushing and growing. You lose all the forward progress that you made.

It’s a setup to make you feel like a consistent failure.