Goals

You can’t manage  what you can’t measure.

Setting goals helps trigger new behaviours, helps guides your focus and helps you sustain that momentum in life.

Goals also help align your focus and promote a sense of self-mastery. In the end, you can’t manage what you don’t measure and you can’t improve upon something that you don’t properly manage. 

That’s why organizations push goal settings and achievement as a measure of success.

Stretch goals is another mechanism to go over and above what you think you can achieve and exceed yourself.

Does it Really work?

While goals help you focus, they can also make the focus narrow.

It changes your behaviour and creates incentive to reach the end while means become inconsequential.

Your risk preferences become distorted and you lose sight of the larger picture.

In a marathon, the goal is to win.

Not everyone who competes is going to win, so should you even have the marathon.

Everyone is training and taking coaching but chances of winning still remain low.

So what do you really need to succeed-is it skills, practice, process?

How do you bring it all together?

You have skills like everyone else.

Have you identified them?

Do you practice enough to hone the skills?

Is the practice enough?

You need to integrate this all into a system that can give you results.

See winning the marathon is goal, however preparation for the marathon is a system.

The House always wins

If you want to be in gambling, be the house and not the gambler because the house always wins.

Same is the case for investors, the benchmark invariably beats almost all investors irrespective.

Warren Buffett developed a system of buying undervalued good companies and holding them for decades and that worked for him.

A lot of individual investors however want to buy a stock that will g up 20% tomorrow.

That’s a goal and not a system.

You will win a lottery once in a while, however the probability of winning a lottery is 1 in 25.

So you know it’s not going to happen every day.

Bottomline, whether its work, sport or investing-system will win over short-cut almost everytime.

So align your focus and “Stay the Course”