The Practical Way

Setting smart goals

Sunday, 28th September 2008 | Personal Effectiveness

Have you ever set a goal that you wanted to achieve, but it seems to take ages to achieve it? Have you set a goal and after a while you are questioning yourself if it is still a valid goal and if you should put more effort to achieve it? I had this happen to me often in the past and I think that I have found the answer.

Before I give you the answer let me ask you a different question. What is your purpose? What is the big goal? Now, if you do not have clear answers to these questions, this will cause you problems in the medium run. Let me explain.

All of us need a big goal, something that we are moving towards to. For example, I want by the age of 40 to sail around the Greek islands for 3 months. Using this goal for example, we can start to build towards it. You can even say that this goal is not big enough and it is merely a step to a bigger goal. That is good, work to find the even bigger one. For now we will use this example. [...]