On Goals

First, and most importantly, yesterday the tar heels beat the cream cheese out of Duke, and for that, we celebrate.

Second, I plowed through a book called The Strangest Secret while half woozy from post-surgery pain killers last week and I’m not sure if it was those or the book itself but I was pretty engrossed.

The core idea is simple and timeless — if you have explicit goals, you’re likely to reach them. And if you don’t have explicit goals, you’ll just sort of bounce from one thing to the next and never make any sort of meaningful dent.

Obvious advice, but that doesn't mean people follow it.

Two quotes from the book stuck with me. First:

“A success is anyone who is doing deliberately a predetermined job because that’s what he decided to do deliberately. But only one out of twenty does that.”

A reminder that choosing what you want to do and then doing that thing is such an exceedingly rare practice that it’s a differentiating strategy, especially for entrepreneurs. This is solely due to the “choosing” part of the equation — choosing something to focus on and allotting a good amount of time to focus on it is hard. But, once you make the choice, the rest is logistics and usually manageable.

Here’s an example:

I might recognize that there aren’t enough tradespeople. There are, and will continue to be, shortages of plumbers and electricians and carpenters and so on. Because of this, it’s hard for customers who need those services to find and vet them. If my goal is to “improve that process,” there are no boundaries. There’s no tangible goal. But, if I decide that I want to teach 50k people a year to become electricians to start filling that gap, I can actually go to work.

First, I need to find pockets of demand for potential electricians to see if this is even viable and understand why people aren’t becoming electricians in the first place. Next, I need to understand education requirements and why the current system is failing. I need to learn about job placement, career paths, etc. and develop an opinion on it all.

But, it becomes a logistics problem. The goal of teaching 50k electricians a year has created the beginnings of a strategy — find the core problem, figure out how to fix it. And, best of all, when someone says there aren’t enough exterminators, I can say “cool!” then get back to electricians.

Humans, especially entrepreneurs, are distractible. We’re interested in stuff. This is great until it’s not, and a goal can harness it. There’s always going to be a “searching” phase at the beginning — where you’re exploring lots of problems with no specific destination. But, eventually, there needs to be a shift. You need to decide on a goal and pool your resources and attention into flying directly towards it.

Here’s the second quote:

“…Let’s say a farmer has two seeds in his hand. One is a seed of corn, the other is nightshade, a deadly poison. He digs two little holes in the earth, and he plants both seeds—one corn, the other nightshade. He covers up the holes, waters and takes care of the land, and what will happen? Invariably, the land will return what’s planted.

Now remember, the land doesn’t care. It’ll return poison in just as wonderful abundance as it will corn, so up come the two plants—one corn, one poison.

The human mind is far more fertile, far more incredible and mysterious, than the land, but it works the same way. It doesn’t care what we plant—success, failure; a concrete, worthwhile goal or confusion, misunderstanding, fear, anxiety, and so on. But what we plant it must return to us.”

Whatever we put into our mind will grow. Our minds don’t care if the thing we put in is useful or not — if it goes in there, it’ll grow. If it’s a clear goal — teach 50k electricians — it’ll grow. If it’s ambiguity — that’ll grow, too. And, of course, if it’s TikTok or 2 hours of news each day or whatever else — that’ll grow. Your mind treats everything you put into it with the same level of importance. You’ve gotta be the gatekeeper.

I talk a ton about systems, and I always believe that the best results come as a result of those systems. Goals are a huge piece of that. You build a system in support of a goal. So — what’s your goal?