The Benefits of Wise Goal Selection

Wise goal selection enables you to make a contribution to the community as well as to satisfy your desires. You thereby gain the satisfaction of using your capacities productively. Indeed, arriving at appropriate goals either by thinking the matter through or by trial and error is an important element in achieving happiness. People frequently learn to trim down overambitious goals that they fail to achieve and which therefore cause them mental distress. Sometimes people learn to scale up from overly modest goals that afford too little sense of satisfaction that they are using their capacities sufficiently, and too little sense of reward from the product of their efforts.

A goal should be sufficiently difficult that it will present a challenge and stretch your abilities. But it must not be unattainable or seem unattainable. If it seems unattainable, you may give up before you begin. If a goal is unattainable and you go after it anyway, the consequent failure may cause you pain and diminish your energies.

Sports in which the aim is to win against another person are not a good model for goal-setting in the rest of your life and business. In my experience, a person usually does best in work and personal life by trying to do well with respect to one’s capacities and values rather than by trying to do better than another person or organization. A better sports model is trying to make good shots or a low score in golf, or a fast time in running relative to your personal history, or making cleanly executed throws in judo, no matter who wins the match.

Some people believe that the motivation to defeat others increases one’s chances of winning various kinds of contests, including business competitions. It is hard to test this sort of proposition, though it is probably true that different people are best motivated by different mental schemas. Research by Scott Armstrong using several different techniques has shown, however, that using one’s own firm’s profits as a criterion— that is, focusing on one’s own absolute performance—is more effective than focusing on a firm’s share of the market—that is, focusing on one’s relative performance.