How Defining Hard Goals Allows You to Fall in Love with the Process
My long-term journey as a full-time writer has just begun.
When I started my full-time writing journey, I bought one whiteboard to write my long-time goals, the processes I wanted to use, and my weekly achievements.
The first thing I wrote in the up middle of my whiteboard was:
$6,000 per month
We can all discuss if it would be better or not to put another kind of long-time goal, like “being a top writer,” or “being a respectful writer,” or even “publish a book.”
And I will try to earn $6,000 per month as quickly as I can.
Of course, I know it will be a considerable challenge, especially for a non-native writer, but if Sinem Günel and Niklas Göke did it, why can’t I do it too?
The beautiful thing about all these high hard goals is the journey. The day I wrote that number on my whiteboard, I knew I was committing to myself using all the strategies and processes I was about to learn, so I could rapidly get there.
I don’t know what kind of person I will be when I reach the $6,000 per month goal. But I’m sure the journey will be a hell of a ride. Yes, with ups and downs, with tough days or weeks and new challenges emerging every day.
Yet, if you have a brain, two eyes, and two ears, on a platform where tips, information, and detailed explanations are offered to you free of charge, evolution depends, not on your IQ, but on your emotional capacity to learn new things, and leave behind what no longer works in this new world.
How can you design your life on purpose?
There are three levels of goals.
I’ve been following Benjamin Hardy’s Ph.D. research work for more than six months, and in these things of self-improvement, there is no point in inventing or trying to create our own science.
We must observe the best, choose those we identify most, and study everything these experts have to say.
In my case, because I started reading Benjamin Hardy’s Ph.D. articles on Medium, and I immediately identified with the updated way his self-improvement studies were being developed, I decided to follow his work.
Here’s Dr. Hardy explaining why we should design three levels of goals in our minds:
If you have all three, not only will you be really clear on who you are and where you’re going, you’ll have peace of mind. It’ll honestly slow time down and make you feel like you’ve got a lot of clarity, but also it’ll give you a lot of productivity.
Why should goals be in the form of your purpose?
Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis, authors of the book The Art of Impossible, suggest having a transformative purpose.
A transformative purpose could be a mission, a place of profound change, a dream coming true. Those purposes should have harmonious passion, meaning you can have multiple goals of your life, but they all converge in a balanced fashion to help each other. They all join in the same direction.
For example, one of my high-hard goals was to buy land to plant trees. Since I was young, I had this dream to have a forest as far as the eye can see, full of animal life and all kinds of trees. I always loved being outside, not only because I’m an ultra trail runner but also because I love nature and wildlife.
I’ve already bought a 2-acre farm, where I’m starting a project of planting trees, and I want to keep buying land to keep planting trees. So, I already planned a way to earn more money, to buy more land. And that includes my full-time writing project.
I have another high-hard goal of writing and publishing my second book. But to do so, I need time, so I have to earn enough money on my writing journey to have time to write a book.
Buying land, writing a book, and my full-time writing project are all connected. They are all pointing in the same direction, and they are all long time goals.
These three purposes are my north star.
Why hard goals instead of small goals?
It all has to be with motivation. The research shows that really high, really challenging, and tough goals create more incentive, stimulates our personal growth, and it’s much more exciting.
These challenging goals are not things you can accomplish in a week or month. They may take months or several years. Things like getting a college degree, writing a book, planning a family, or preparing a trip around the world are examples of hard goals.
In that arduous journey, you get better at reaching those goals through a process of getting up there and achieving something big. You now have new levels of self-confidence. You’ve created a new path, a new trajectory, a new context.
Having your own hard goals allows you to run your own race. You don’t have to force any short-term goals and create stress and anxiety all the time because, in your head, you’re already visualizing the final place where you want to be.
My oldest daughter has 14, and my youngest has 11. It means that seven years from now, in 2028, both are already in the university. In fact, I’ve already planned in my mind and wrote in my journal a place where I want to be when my two daughters leave home. It will surely change my routines, my expenses, and my relationship with them. They no longer will be close to me, they will need some kind of financial help, and I, as a father, need a more flexible job to support them when they need it.
Writing all these long-time goals allows me to relax, to plan, to slow down my pace, and to visualize every single day the place where I want to be seven years from now.
Why create specific goals?
Specific goals are things you can accomplish right now. For example, I want to write 1,000 words today to complete my daily task. I want to write seven articles this week. Specific goals are things on your daily to-do list.
Specific goals have a substantial impact at the moment, but not in the long term. In fact, it’s like you have a minimum effective dose of something every day that doesn’t impact your vision in the short term, but it allows you to accomplish it in the long run.
From an energetic perspective, you have to find out your minimum effective dose of daily work that will have the most impact in the long run.
Remember, it’s supposed to be a stressless journey. So, finding the minimum impact of your daily work creates room for high value and high caliber of everything you do in these specific goals.
Final Thoughts
Your high hard goals have the power to make you fall in love with the process.
First, they allow you to slow the time down, low your levels of stress, and make you clarify the ultimate vision of what you want to accomplish.
Nowadays, slowing down the pressure and the stress is the true differentiator between a smooth ride and a busy trip, full of attractions and annoyances.
My long-term journey as a full-time writer has just begun, and of course, reaching the $6,000 per month hard goal makes me focus on the vision of my future. But it also makes me enjoy the ride.
If I can reach that milestone before 2028, that means I will fulfill a mindfulness transition when my two daughters leave home to their independent new life.
I will have more time to spend with them and with myself. And for that to happen, I had to learn so many new skills that somehow will make me a different person then, with various tools to fight new challenges.
If you are consistent in reaching your short goals and your hard goals, it will create a considerable compounding effect. Short goals with high impact, long hard goals with low stress, and structural changes in life- are the two binary forces that will transform you forever.
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