A Thought On Goals
I always set goals. Every single year I reflect on the year in December, track progress, and start thinking about the year to come.
About half way through last year I realized my goals were horrible. Not because the goals themselves weren’t worthy, but the way I wrote and structured them demotivated me, especially when I wasn’t seeing the progress I wanted despite putting in the effort.
So I’m writing this post not about my goals, but about how I set goals and how this approach has helped my mental health stay fit while I work toward achieving what I set out to do.
Why Approach Matters
When you set a goal and track your progress how do you feel? Are you ecstatic about how quickly you are getting there or are you demotivated by your lack of progress?
If you have felt either of these things you might be setting your goals wrong.
The problem is we are taught to make goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). But smart goals often focus on the measure and often the measure is the wrong.
Let’s take one of my goals for 2023 as an example. In 2023 my goal was to become monetized on YouTube. That’s SMART in every sense of the definition with a built in measure set by YouTube. I needed 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours on my long-form videos.
The problem with those measures is they were out of my control. Not because YouTube set them, but because my actions did not necessarily influence those measures.
When you make a YouTube video there are two metrics that tell you if the video is good. The first is click through rate or CTR which is the percent of people who saw your thumbnail and clicked on it. That measures how good you are at making a compelling thumbnail and title to entice people to watch. The second is average view duration which measures the percentage of the video people watched. This metric is an indication of quality, essentially, is your video good.
Now people will leave for various reasons, but if you can get them to come in the door and stay to watch then you’ll grow. You’ll get more subscribers and watch time.
The problem is all those metrics are influenced by other people and their behavior, and not your effort that went into the videos.
In May I launched a video I thought was going to be my breakthrough. This was the one that was going to get me hundreds of subscribers and thousands of views, but it didn’t and it was demoralizing.
That’s when realized my problem and made a shift. My goal wasn’t to be monetization but to improve my video content and the only way to that is to make videos.
So I changed my goal to posting 1 video per month and to improve one thing in each video.
My first month I improved my sound, the next my lighting. What happened was my videos improved and I started getting more views until a short 4 months after I changed my goal I was monetized.
And that’s why approach matters. If you fret over things outside of your control you’ll spend energy on things that don’t matter, like view counts and watch hours while you could be spending time on things that will actually make a difference.
How can you do it?
So you want to change your goals but you don’t know how. It’s simple, write down what you want to have happen. At this stage it can be anything even if it is outside of your control. For me it’s to reach 10,000 subscribers this year.
But that number isn’t my focus, my focus is on what needs to be done to get there. I’m sticking to one video per month and I’m continuing to improve them, but the videos are going to be bigger.
I want 12 furniture builds this year, last year I had 7. That means I have to focus and spend my time in the shop wisely, doing fewer projects but bigger projects because I believe that’s what will make a difference. And luckily, that goal and the metric are completely within my control.
Oh, and my last video brought in 850 subscribers, so multiply that by 12 and I’m well over my target for the year.
So pick the target to aim for but focus on the activity that will get you there. Find out how you can measure it and see focus on the activity, not the outcome.
Still stuck? Here are a few examples.
Desired Outcome: Lose 10 pounds.
Influencing Factors: Diet and exercise.
Goal: I will only eat out once a month and I will take a walk every day.
Desired Outcome: Learn to play the piano
Influencing Factors: Practice.
Goal: I will take private lessons once a week for 6 months.
Desired Outcome: Build a coffee table.
Influencing Factors: Knowledge, tools, skills.
Goal: Build a box first to test skills and joinery, find out what tools to invest in to go bigger and make a table, oh, and watch some YouTube videos.