M-SMART Goals
If you’ve already explored what drives you (Foundational Wealth) and learned how to create credos, missions, and visions around the goals you value, your goals are defined. Now it's time to refine them. That's where M-SMART Goals come in.
Learn Spanish isn’t really a goal because you don’t have any criteria by which you can say you achieved it. Almost everyone in the United States, South and Central America, and Europe technically speaks some Spanish—most people have probably said or at least heard the word “adios.” Furthermore, even highly educated native Spanish speakers realistically speak only part of the language; I doubt many people know every single Spanish word, much like you and I don’t know every single English word. Knowing a language isn’t really a black or white thing.
So, at what point can you say you “learned Spanish?”
Does knowing how to say, “¿Dónde está la biblioteca?” count as having learned Spanish? Or is that not enough? How about being able to watch a Spanish-language soap opera and follow along with the plot? Or being able to hold a conversation in Spanish with a native speaker without their knowing it wasn’t your first language? That one may be a bit unrealistic.
With this ambiguity highlighted, what are the criteria by which you’d be able to say you’ve achieved your goal? This is my point: it’s important to refine goals you value—to add details about your execution plan, timelines, and desired end result.
Plain Old SMART Goals
I feel a little dirty discussing SMART Goals because they’ve been addressed ad nauseam by thousands of personal development educators and corporate trainers. Along with words like synergy, it reeks of the type of overused business jargon that makes you want to pair the word with an air quote gesture. Buzz-term or not, they’re an incredibly simple and effective way to think about goals.
If you’re not familiar, a SMART Goal refers to a goal that’s specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.
To illustrate, let’s turn learn Spanish into a SMART Goal: Be able to speak Spanish well enough to watch and understand all dialogue in the film Die Hard in Spanish (without subtitles) on or before February 1, four years from now. This is a purposely silly example, but it’s memorable and perfectly illustrates SMART Goals and all they entail.
It’s specific — You chose to specify “Die Hard” instead of saying “an action movie” and “Spanish” instead of “a foreign language.”
It's measurable — In the big picture, you can measure success by whether or not you understand all dialogue by your deadline; if a single sentence evades you, you haven’t succeeded. In the short term—that is to say, during the process of achieving your goal—you could quantifiably measure your improvement each time you watch the film; for instance, you could dedicate time to learning Spanish every Monday through Thursday, and then watch the movie each Friday; you could then write a plus or minus symbol on a piece of paper after each sentence of dialogue to signify whether or not you understood it, and then go back afterward and determine what percentage you understood, tracking your progress week over week. It’s certainly a clumsy solution, but it makes the goal measurable.
It's attainable — Human beings can learn new languages at any point in their lives. Others have done it. The goal isn’t to be the first person to speak Spanish on Jupiter.
It’s realistic — The due date is set four years into the future, which—some cursory research will show—is an ambitious but reasonable amount of time for an adult English-speaker to learn a Romance language somewhat well. You didn’t say you wanted to accomplish the goal within three months. Don’t confuse attainable and realistic; attainable means it can be done, and realistic means you can do it within the time limits and constraints described.
Lastly, it’s time-bound — Time-bound and realistic are closely related. An end date is set, and it’s expected that the goal will be reached on or before this date. You didn’t say you’d learn Spanish eventually. There’s an art to giving your goal’s timeline some breathing room while not providing so much that you can afford to slack. Everyone has to take a break now and then, and life occasionally throws unexpected challenges your way. Later, you’ll assign consequences to inaction and failure, so resist the urge to be hyper-aggressive when deciding on timelines. You’ll also soon learn why the date you choose here will most likely not end up being your final deadline; rather, it provides an estimate that serves to guide your overall intention.
We’re used to ill-refined goals; they’re baked into our culture and language. I constantly hear educated adults state their so-called goals with the same dismissive simplicity they probably exhibited when their fourth-grade teacher asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. “Start a helicopter piloting school” is an ill-refined goal. “Create an iPhone app that helps identify wild birds” or “become the number one private wealth advisor in the region” are only a little better. What are three primary functions the wild bird app should provide? You want to become the number one private wealth advisor in the region by what metric? Customer satisfaction? Revenue? Market share? By when?
Take a few moments and construct SMART Goals from the following incomplete goals:
Be able to run a 5k
Learn self-defense
Take your time and perform some basic research, if necessary.
There are obviously many possible SMART Goals that could be extracted from these two incomplete ones, but here are some possible solutions for example’s sake:
Be able to run a 5k in twenty-three minutes (under normal weather conditions) by this time next year.
Achieve a non-beginner degree in a self-defense-applicable martial art (such as blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or green belt in Krav Maga) at a respected academy within two years.
Take a close look at these two SMART Goals. I think you’ll agree they’re both specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Your research should have shown that if you aren’t incredibly young or elderly and don’t have any outstanding health or physical impediments, both running a twenty-three minute 5k and earning a non-white martial arts belt are realistic (though ambitious) in the respective amounts of time allocated.
Adding the “M”
Now let’s talk about a Foundations of Execution-specific addition to the classic SMART Goal. As you may have guessed given how much I've written about Foundational Wealth and CMVs, the M stands for Motivation. An M-SMART Goal is motivation-focused, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. As much as possible, your M should embody a concise summary of how the goal will help you realize your CMV.
While a SMART Goal may be formatted as I want to achieve [goal detail] by [date], an M-SMART Goal would look more like I want to achieve [goal detail] by [date] because [motivation]. This will often result in a run-on sentence, a series of sentences questionably tied together with semicolons, or something of the like. That’s okay; your high school English teachers won’t see it. Going back to CMVs: In many ways, the SMART aspects of these goals define paths to execution and reflect their respective Missions, while the M tends to speak more to Credos and Visions.
Here are two examples:
I want to build a marketing strategy consulting business with at least four active simultaneous clients and monthly revenue of over $1,000 on or before December 31st of next year because I enjoy working in the marketing field but feel that my vision, experience, and unorthodox ideas are under-appreciated by my current employer.
That was definitely a run-on sentence. Another:
I want to write a novel about a young woman whose confidence and luck improve drastically after being bitten by a wolf, only to later realize that the power of positive change was within her the entire time and that the bite had nothing to do with it. I want to have it written, edited by a third party, and pitched to at least one publisher before December 31st of next year. I’ve struggled with confidence in my own life, so I want to explore the idea of finding inner strength and share the story with others who may be experiencing similar confidence issues.
That one was a full-out paragraph. That’s fine, but don’t go crazy and write a manifesto; you should be able to (loosely) recite your M-SMART Goal from memory. As an exercise, take the above two SMART Goal examples (be able to run a 5k and learn self-defense), come up with imaginary motivations, and add Ms to them.
Worksheets
Get your hands dirty! Check out a comprehensive (and free) worksheet to help you make the most of this specific Foundations of Execution strategy.
M-SMART Goals are just one of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.
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Description text goes hereYou’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.
When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.
No more bullshit.
Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.
As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.
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