Scott Adams has a book that took me about 5 minutes to read (not because it’s so hard, but because it’s so clear and straightforward; and, some books should just be One Long Blog Post and hopefully this one isn’t of those) in which he makes one argument and makes it better than I can. He says, “Goals are for losers” and his alternative replacement for goals are processes.
This is such an insightful point; that blog post, errr, book, was worth it just for that one point. I will admit, while my whole life had been organizing around that principle, for decades, I had never realized it so clearly and explicitly until I read it in that book. Thank you, Scott! My reasoning is very different from his reasoning, even though we arrive at the same conclusion.
Think about it this way: goals are almost always fake. They’re usually a commonly agreed to lie. Our goal is to release it Thursday at 9am? What if we release it Thursday at 9:01am, what changes? Nothing. They do have their purpose, like motivating people, but they are mostly a lie.
But let’s discuss their purpose in motivating people. Isn’t that a sucky motivation? Think about the cheesy, low-quality car snake oil salesman who you usually see in bad movies. He is motivated so strongly by the 1-cent bonus he gets if he achieves his goal for that month. Is that you? Really?
External motivations tend to be temporary. Set a goal if you have a very temporary time-horizon. And sometimes you do. There is a time and place for goals. But your client is probably hiring you because they want a longer-term, deeper relationship with you. That’s where goals fail miserably.
The alternative is a process. I’d recommend that any time you think of having a goal, or your boss or client recommends one, to reframe it as the question: what process can I create that is likely to bring me to that goal, or as close to it as possible?
Look at it like this, let’s say I want to become a better writer. I could:
Set the goal: In [X years from now], I can be a great writer. That’s my goal!
But just reading that now, doesn’t that sound kind of like a loser way to think about it? Once you realize that goals make you sound like a loser, you start noticing it everywhere.
Here’s what’s much healthier: reframing it as a process. So imagine, I scrap that goal and instead, I say:
Set the process: Over the next [X] years, every day I’m going to spend 45 minutes reading great, classic literature closely, including stopping to think about each beautiful sentence and ask myself why it is so beautiful. I’m also going to spend another 45 minutes every day writing for fun, always trying to write in ways that are a bit more complex than my current level, like writing in different voices and styles.
Compare the person with the goal vs. the person with that process. When [X] years come around, who is going to be a better writer?
Of course, goals and processes can go hand in hand. In the above example, you can have both. But the goal is all about gaming your internal psychological motivations. On the other hand, it’s the process that sets forth how to make it happen. And if you do need to game your internal motivations, then I would recommend to not dedicate yourself to achieving that goal but dedicate yourself to following through on your chosen process over the long-term. Defining a process is easy, following the process is hard—and that is the third most common reason why most goals fail. The second most common reason is that the process you chose is bad. And the first most common reason is that you don’t even have a process.
A counterargument to the above, that the sampling process is the process I developed and have followed every day of my life, with under 11 exceptions, for 20 years now. So, you can judge for yourself how effective that process is. “True story”!
