In Quarter 4 of 2018 I set five goals:
· Write 10 Medium Posts
· Use Contactually (software) to help me keep in touch with people who I care about
· Grow Video Husky to $50k MRR
· Practice 50 hours of salsa
· Study 100 hours of Japanese
I didn’t achieve any of these.
On one hand not achieving my goals sucks. The reason we set goals is because we want to improve in an area that matters to us and as a result, we’re emotionally invested. When we hit our goals, we get that rush of positive emotions that gives us a little extra motivation and pushes up on that upward spiral. On the flip side though, so many things can go wrong and when we don’t hit those goals, it means we can lose motivation and self belief — kicking off a negative emotional spiral that’s difficult to get out of.
Yet on the other hand, these relative failures also become an opportunity to sit back, reflect and improve. Normally we associate positive with good and negative with bad, but the biggest lesson that I’ve learned in the past quarter is that isn’t always the case. Given that, I wanted to share a few lessons in goal setting and growth that I’ve learned in the past quarter.
1) The importance of perspective
If I defined success in a simple yes or no matter — then I’ve failed in all my quarter 4 endeavors. Yet things are never as simple as black and white. While I hit none of these goals, whether it was studying 93 hours of Japanese, doubling Video Husky’s revenue and team size or writing 30+ posts on Quora, progress was still being made and that’s worth celebrating. It’s hard to appreciate the growth we experience when we’re in the middle of the struggle but taking the time to look back allows us to have the right perspective — something I don’t want to lose.
Moreover, in a way it also makes sense to not reach my goals. In his book “Measure What Matters” John Doerr discussed how “In Google’s OKR climate, it was understood that 70% achievement was considered a success.” The point he was trying to make was if all goals are achieved, then simply put they were too easy.
The whole point of goal setting is to grow, to become somebody who can reach his goals and by default that means the person who I currently am isn’t able to achieve those goals. It means accepting that unknown factors that might come up and risking the shame of failure because I value growth more than either of these things and understand they’re an undeniable part of the process.
Given these realizations, the lesson that I’ve learned is perspective matters because it gives me the means to forgive myself when things don’t go my way, to re-align my current efforts with my long term goals and to have the motivation to continue working.
2) Why metrics matter
One of the most impactful concepts I learned in Quarter 4 was the idea of OKRs. First designed by Andy Grove at Intel and then popularized by Google, OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and is the best goal setting framework that I’ve found. Simply explained, every quarter you set an objective (ideally something inspirational) and then set 3–5 key results that define what success look like.
I only discovered OKRs midway through Q4 of 2018, but had I known about it, I would have re-written salsa goal as:
· Objective: To be able to dance a full song without mistakes
o Key Result 1: Practiced 50 hours
o Key Result 2: Learn 20 moves
o Key Result 3: Went to 10 salsa nights
I found this to be a much better goal than what I previously set for two reasons. First, the objective of being able to dance a full song is much more aspirational and motivational than “dance 50 hours of salsa”. The reality is I’m not logging these hours for the sake for it, but because I want to improve and being able to dance a full song is what improvement looks like to me.
Secondly, setting my key results forces me to be realistic about whether my objective is achievable. Looking back at my original Video Husky goal of $50k MRR, had I properly defined my OKRs, I would have known this was near impossible. We had neither the marketing knowledge to bring in 80 new customers, nor the capacity to service them and to expect to be able to do both within 90 days was setting myself up for disappointment.
Peter Drucker said it best when he said, “What gets measured, gets improved” and so all my objectives going forward will have the right key results attached to them.
3) How less is more
The final big lesson that I learned in Quarter 4 was that I tried to get too much done.
For all of 2018 I set myself five goals every quarter and not once was I able to achieve all five. The reality is trying to prioritize and switch focus between five things that matter to me was too much and as a result I spread my focus out too thin.
Given this lesson, for the first Quarter of 2019, I’ve decided to limit myself to these four objectives:
o Objective 1: Improve my productivity through better concentration and prioritizing.
· KR 1: Take notes on Power of full engagement.
· KR 2: Take notes on Managing oneself OR Working clean.
· KR 3: 520 30-minute work sessions.
· KR 4: Handed off weekly scheduling to PA.
o Objective 2: Have Video Husky serve 80 active clients.
· Sub-objective 1: Generate 1,875 leads.
· Sub-objective 2: Implement a weekly reporting system at Video Husky for Pod Heads and up.
· Sub-objective 3: Hire a personal assistant.
o Objective 3: Set up a strong foundation for speaking Japanese.
· KR 1: studied 150 hours (~250 total)
· KR 2: memorized 200 more words from the frequency list (~300 total)
· KR 3: Finished 60 Pimsleur lessons
o Objective 4: Start a blog with 10 posts.
· KR 1: Take notes from Mark Manson/Nicolas Cole/Nat Eliason.
· KR 2: Set up a blog
· KR 3: Have a process to edit and upload posts seamlessly
· KR 4: Have 10,000 published words
Ultimately in 2019 there are only three things that I want to focus on: growing Video Husky, learning Japanese and launching a blog. My hope is by narrowing my focus to only these three things, I’ll be able to make more progress in each area than what I’ve previously managed!