What do a fly in the urinal, chocolate elephants and photocopiers have in common? Goals! – Part 2

Every year starts full of hope about lofty dreams and plans for the future. By February, only ~60% of us have the same enthusiasm, by mid year more than half of us will give up. According to a survey done by the Operations Research Corporations, 24% (one in four people) NEVER succeed and have failed on every resolution every year. That is an astounding number of failures!

Enthusiasm and motivation are VERY powerful ways to get started, but what will keep us driving to the finish line through the daily grind? Here are 10 goal hacks that should help us reach our goals.

How to achieve goals : 10 goal hacks for better success

1. Understand what kind of person you are and what motivates you : As I mentioned in my why goals are important and why goals fail post, I am not a person who can motivate myself with just my goal. That much I learned from my past failures. I figured I needed to do two things

(1) I need to have more than a goal, I need to have something in my life that will be affected either negatively if I fail or positively if I succeed. Whenever I feel down or feel like giving up, I needed to think about the goal’s effect in my life rather than the goal itself to motivate me. Why did I set these particular goals? What do I hope to gain by achieving these goals? What are the repercussions if I fail?

(2) Methods used by others to achieve goals don’t work for me. I need to find ways that work for me.

2. Write them down and visualize : Once you have the final goal, write it down. Writing down the ups the odds for the goal succeeding – writing down your goals provides you with a purpose, writing down your goals makes you think them through, forces you to figure out what is important to you, writing down your goals makes you focus and makes you envision success.

Also, find a relevant picture that motivates you while setting any goal up and print it out. If you have that picture accessible when you are weak, that should be enough of an elixir to push you through. If seeing the progress in a chart motivates you, take the time to do that.

3. Take it one step at a time : Some people feel you should “Shoot for the stars. Even if you miss, you’ll land on the moon.” That is great if you really do plan and make every possible effort to reach the stars. More often than not, as soon as we hit a snag, we think “Oh well, I won’t be able to finish it anyway, so why bother leaving the cushy space I have now“. So we should have a clear, smaller set of mini goals that will help us reach the stars. How would you eat a chocolate elephant?  Piece by piece right? This serves two purposes (1) We can celebrate small victories. For me that is a great motivator. (2) You will know exactly what the path to the stars is, now even if you don’t end up among the stars this year, you can continue your journey one step at a time next year.

4. Stop living in la-la land, start committing : Some amount of fantasy is required for motivation. After all it is the dream that is pushing us. But a lot of us stop here. We keep fantasising and never actually do anything. The dream itself gives us enough pleasure, we never pursue the actual thing. Because… well… dreaming is easy, doing is not. Really, if you have been dreaming about something for quite sometime and have never progressed, the solution is : stop dreaming, start doing.

5. Start somewhere : This goes in hand with 3 & 4. Sometimes our goals are intimidating, sometimes it takes too much planning, but we have to start somewhere. Starting is a huge step toward success. In psychology, there is a concept referred as the Zeigarnik effect which states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. When we are in the middle of something we are constantly reminded of it, otherwise it will either stay as a dream or a distant memory. So stop procrastinating and start somewhere… anywhere.

6. What the hell effect : My most successful failure technique. Yes, I document my failures I am sure I am not the only person to have this effect. This is how it works – if for example, I would slip one day and have a piece of cake at an office party. Then for dinner I justify eating more saying that “the day is a wash anyway” because I already slipped. Then the next day would be “I didn’t do well this week anyway..” so more eating. You get the point. Now I take the day by the hour.

7. Robotic behavior : We try to succeed in our goals by using methods that worked for others. Want to lose weight, hit the gym. Want to save money, cut all spending. We forget to think about who we are when we set the plan. By doing this we set ourselves up to fail. If you already know running in a gym will make you want to poke youself in the eye, then you might want to do something more fun like mowing the lawn instead

8. What is the ultimate point? : Goals are a great way to achieve what we want in life, but we shouldn’t forget the big picture of why we want what we want.

9. Shift focus : When we split the goals into mini-goals and work our way forward, we could be faced with 2 situations. Sometimes, the end goal might be too difficult, too daunting. During those times, it will be more motivating to keep the task at hand and take it one day at a time instead of thinking about the big, scary goal. Other times, the mini-goals might be too boring, for example, if you have automated your personal finance, it will be much more motivating to think about the ultimate goal.

10. Plan for failure : Some people might say that you shouldn’t plan for failure before you even start. Personally for me, this doesn’t work. For me the more prepared I am, the more confidence I have and greater the chances of me succeeding. Otherwise I panic, make mistakes, temporarily stop my progress to fix my mistakes and eventually give up.

Bonus hack : Finally for every little step along the way, celebrate your success, and give yourself a reward. Make mini goals and write down appropriate rewards for each accomplishment, so that you can look forward to those rewards. That way you will satisfy the need to have instant gratification and also be on track to achieve your goal.

I personally feel every goal is a choice, we have a choice to see it through to the end or give up. Most of the time when we fail, we just choose to fail.

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” - Henry Ford