We should distinguish between Targets and Goals for our careers

If you shoot for the moon and miss, you’ll still land among the stars, right?

You’ve likely heard that saying, “if you shoot for the moon and miss, you’ll still land among the stars.” It’s a great saying. It can help us realize that if we dream big, we can still fail into someone else’s success.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s say that you have two people: Tim and Tom. Tim is a dreamer. He’s dreaming of owning a mansion with millions of dollars in the bank and never having to work again.

Tom is a realist. His dream is much smaller. He dreams of a stable career, owning his own home, with enough money to pay his bills, keep food on his plate, and save some in the bank to enjoy later.

Tim and Tom start their careers at the same time.

Tom

Tom is focused on stability. He looks up the most stable jobs and realizes postal carriers have some of the lowest unemployment rates. He also realizes that the United States Postal Service is likely to never close in his lifetime because of government politics.

He makes a decent salary, keeps his expenses low, buys a small house, and even gets married and raises a couple of kids on his postal salary. As he gets older, he gets promoted to postmaster but decides that’s where he’ll stay because further promotions dive too far into politics and add risk to his career.

When he retires, he has earned a pension that provides for him and his wife in their old age.

Tim

Tim realizes that he will need lots of money for his dream, so he gets into sales. He hustles hard. He earns a lot of money on commissions while also earning promotions that increase his base salary.

Tim keeps hustling on his personal time, too. At first, he invests in high-growth stocks and cryptocurrency. However, he realizes a massive amount of losses there, so he changes strategies to buying mainly dividend-paying stocks and letting them grow over time.

He also realizes that as he’s getting older, it’s harder to hustle in sales as hard as he used to, so he takes a lateral transition to management. He loses the commissions but gets a sizable bump in base salary to compensate. He’s still hustling on the side, though, and decides to invest in rental properties to provide for him in the future.

Tim also buys a house, not a mansion, but one on the larger side of average. He gets married and raises a couple of kids in that home.

Finally, Tim decides it’s time to quit hustling and retires. In his time, he’s built a decent portfolio of dividend-paying stocks and rental properties, which provide him and his wife with enough income to live a good life after retirement.

Is Tim a failure?

Technically, yes. Based on his dream, he failed. But he’s no worse off than Tom. His family might even be better off than Tom’s because once Tom dies, his pension ends, but when Tim dies, he can leave his rental properties to his kids, and they will keep earning.

Targets are our dreams

The story of Tim and Tom is trying to show that targets are our dreams. They are the things in the distance that we’d like to do one day, but if we fail at them, that’s okay, too.

If the status quo is Point A, then our targets should be considered Point Z. We can’t know all the points between A and Z because they’re too far in the future.

Goals are SMART

Our goals, however, are Points B, C, and D. We should have a clear understanding of everything that it will take to get from Point A to Point B. Even if we don’t know how to do it, we should know what to do.

SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Our goals should be SMART goals.

My Target

I started coming up with this concept of goals versus targets about ten years ago. It started because I had a dream, and in that dream, I was 60 years old, driving on the road in an RV with my wife, visiting places we’d always wanted to visit but could never afford to see.

That was it. I knew that this was the target I was aiming for—my ideal retirement. I had no idea how to get there. I was making very little money, with no prospects. But that didn’t bother me because I had over 30 years to worry about that.

Breaking down a Target

So I started working backward from that target. First, I asked myself how I could afford to own an RV and maintain it. The answer I came up with was that I had multiple sources of income, and they were large enough to cover those expenses.

So I asked myself what kinds of sources of income I had. I didn’t have a clear answer, but I knew that to be able to feel secure, they would need to span a multitude of industries. This way, if the income fluctuated, I could be protected.

I moved on.

How would I get those sources of income? I knew then that I would have to build them. I’d need to use my blood, sweat, and tears to make them, or I’d need to invest money into creating them. Likely both.

That immediately brought to mind the following question: How did I get the money? I’d need a good-paying job to earn that money.

What kind of job? My only valuable skill is that I can program computers. At the time, I was doing just that for $12.50/hour. It wasn’t enough. I knew I’d need to make more.

Starting down that path

When I had this epiphany, I was making more money than I had ever made in my life up to that point. I had been doing code for four years, and my previous jobs had paid at most $7.50/hour, and in the position that I had just left previously, I’d only made 10 hours per week. $75 per week, before taxes.

It was crazy that I was telling myself that I needed to quit my job.

But I knew it was right. I knew that I could make more than double my hourly rate by doing freelance code.

Roadblocks

So that’s exactly what I did. And I failed miserably at it.

I ended up homeless, with two kids and a wife working part-time at Walmart.

It was a setback, and I admit that I worried I had made a terrible mistake. To make ends meet, I took a job at a call center, but six months later, I got a call offering me an interview for a programming position. In that position, I made just under $27/hour.

Six years and one $5,000/year promotion later, we were hit by a global pandemic, and I’m forced to work from home. I realized during this time that I was just surviving. I had stalled on my road toward my target.

I also realized that I was afraid of quitting and making my family homeless again. I had gone from Tim to Tom.

I wanted to be Tim again.

On the Road again

I pondered the questions again, and I knew the next step was to find a position that allowed me to make my remote working arrangement permanent. That was my only goal.

I not only did that but was able to get a salary that was approximately 150% of what I was currently making and a role that would see me doing programming work full time again.

My next goals are smaller: Continue to grow in my new role and build out my income streams. First with stocks, then with website income, finally with real estate and writing.

Conclusion

Do I think I’ll see my dream of being 60, driving around in an RV with my wife? I honestly don’t know. But I’m not too worried about it. Because what I do know is that I’ll be close enough that I won’t care at that point.

In the meantime, I’m looking at new targets, like taking trips with my kids and getting to see their eyes light up when they see sights they’ve never seen before, like the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore.

And frankly, that’s good enough for me.