Mediations #11: Seek Goals That Will Change How You Live

Defining the right mindset and the strategies to set goals correctly

While I was writing about goals for the first time, I challenged myself to reconsider the concept of goal setting. I tried setting goals in different ways and failed in almost all of them. During these four years, all my failures taught me a lot. Now, I know what I did wrong.

I’ll share with you how to negotiate with yourself to set the right goals. This post will also be a note for me to visit again and remind myself how the system works.

Everything starts with setting the right mindset around goals.

The Right Mindset

I learned that suffering is the source of happiness. This is counterintuitive, but we value things more when we bear the ups and downs of them. Think about a challenging process you went through, such as getting a new job or learning a new skill as a hobby. During the process, things might feel frustrating, but when we make it, it feels great. Our commitment and the distress we endure is directly proportional to the intrinsic value we assign to it. Hence, we feel happier when we spend our time with whatever we value more.

Besides happiness, success and achieving goals are unrelated. I can fail all my goals and consider myself successful. These two are entirely irrelevant even though society pushes us to attach them together more. A goal aims at the process within a timeframe; success aims at the definition of identity and feelings. A goal is a short-term investment, while success is a long-term personality trait. Therefore, a goal that says, “improve A by X% in Y months,” is not a definition of success, but it’s a progression.

Without tracking, we can’t judge the progress. Tracking goals is more important than achieving them. The primary purpose of having a goal is to track progress and adjust to changes; that’s it. Achieving the goals is in the second or third plan compared to monitoring progress. Tracking progress constantly reminds our brains to do something about it because tracking goals helps us build our identity.

In the two paragraphs above, I said that the definition of success should be separated from achieving goals. However, when goals are used correctly, they are powerful enough to form an identity. If I define an objective for myself that says, “Become a writer,” I add a new identity to myself. Although it’s not a great goal itself (we’ll learn below why), I can define specific sub-goals aligned with this identity, such as “publish 40 blog articles in 2025.” The magic happens when I call myself a writer. My brain automatically thinks: “What do writers do? They write. If I’m a writer, then I should write, too,” and I find myself writing this newsletter. Ta-da!

Now that we have established the mindset, let’s learn how to define goals.

Defining Goals

How we define goals changes the result and the success rate.

Define goals that will form habits rather than ones you’ll complete and forget about. Instead of saying, “I will read 20 books in 2025,” turn it into, “I will read >20 mins a day for 300 days.” If your reading speed is average, 20 minutes a day will quickly bring you ~20 books in a year. This way, the goal doesn’t seem too far, and carving out 20 minutes daily is easier than dealing with 20 books. In the end, you also form a habit that will stick with you for the rest of your life.

If you recognize it, I didn’t say to read for 20 minutes every day; I capped it at 300 days. While reading about economics and psychology, I learned about the margin of safety or margin of error. There should be a buffer on the goal for setbacks. Instead of, “Write every day in 2025,” which will be unsuccessful on the first day you skip writing for any reason, say, “Write for more than 300 days in 2025.” The remaining 65 days will be the margin of safety. Skipping three days a month or a whole month will still bring achievement.

Keep the goals as small as possible and as ambitious as necessary. What matters is the habits you form and the constant output it brings. If you’re not reading books at all, start by setting a goal for 5 minutes or a page a day instead of 20 minutes. The Kaizen way suggests that it should be so small that you have no option but to do it. For example, I started flossing one tooth a day years ago; that was my goal. It was so tiny that I could not not-do it. Now, I’m flossing all my teeth every day.

Much like flossing every day, small commitments bring consistency, as the author of the phenomenal book Influence and Psychologist Robert Cialdini says. In a tiny commitment, we create an identity, and without even thinking about it, we try to do more of what we committed. If we make an insignificant donation to a charity (like signing a petition on the street), the charity organization uses that commitment and a month later asks for a much bigger one. In the first signature, we identify ourselves as the supporters of that cause, we feel obliged to follow up and increase our donation. Hence, while shaping goals, find what fits your identity or define a new one and start small (for example, I’m a writer now).

While creating a new identity, you must also align your environment with the goals. In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear says setting up your environment is the primary enabler for changing habits. If you want to read more and spend less time on your phone, don’t put phone chargers in every corner of your apartment. Replace them with books and magazines. If you want to write more, put pens and notepads everywhere in an arm’s distance. If you want to exercise more, get your exercise materials (e.g., yoga mat) out of the closet and put them into places where you can always see them. The more you have them around, the more chances you have to do something with them.

Another criterion is that the goals must be free of external influence and dependency. You must have complete control. A goal that says, “I will be promoted to X role,” is not under your control. You can’t decide on your promotion alone. However, “I will study A for three months twice a week, which will help me get promoted to X” is better and under your control.

The last thing I learned is to set goals publicly. When others see our promises, we push ourselves to follow up on our commitments (remember the charity example above? They work because the commitments we make are not for ourselves). You don’t have to share your goals on social media; you can share them with friends, family, and whoever you want. The more people know, the better. Your brain thinks it’s a public promise and forces you to do more.

Seek goals that will change how you live

I still don’t remember whether I achieved or failed most of my past goals, which shows that they didn’t introduce a fundamental shift in my life. Also, these changes happen over time; it’s difficult to see the long-term changes.

As humans, our brains can’t think in the very long term. We are stimulated with short-term gains for better survival, and our evolution speed can’t keep up with the advancements the human race has made over the last centuries. That’s why we underestimate the advantages of compounding (e.g., the exponential result of improving 1% every day) and long-term investment in anything.

Seek goals that will change how you live, work, study, invest, etc., rather than something you’ll achieve and forget about. If you improve by 1% every day, you’ll reach your goals much faster, and they will be permanent thanks to the compounding effect of a small thing you changed.

With all the learnings I shared above, I am (and you are, too) better equipped to introduce long-lasting changes that will result in incredible achievements.

P.S. ​Paradise Paradox can help you plan the new year more realistic​.