Get D.U.M.B.! The Value of Unattainable Goals
With the year winding down, many people are turning their eyes towards the future. January 1st looms, and the new year always holds the promise of a fresh start, another go-round and another try at the golden ring.
It’s a time for taking stock, filing away the lessons of our successes and failures over the last 12 months and pinning down our hopes and dreams for the 12 months to come. Some people make resolutions, feeling in the renewal of the yearly cycle the power to remake themselves to a better plan: thinner, healthier, more focused, wealthier, smarter… happier.
Others set goals. “By this time next year, I will have done x.” Lots of people will tell you that the key to setting smart goals is to set S.M.A.R.T. goals. Heck, I’ve said that the key to goal-setting is setting S.M.A.R.T. goals. Those are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound; “lose 10 pounds by the end of February” rather than “lose weight”, for example.
There’s a lot to be said for that approach, of course. The idea behind S.M.A.R.T. goals is that it gives you something concrete and realistic to work towards, and the brain seems to like that sort of thing. Vague goals give the tricksy brain too much wiggle room: “Hey, I lost weight. Only 2 pounds, but cool! I guess that means I can order an extra double-caramel fudge-nut brownie vanilla sundae surprise tonight!” Unreasonable goals simply set us up for failure, and the tricksy brain will take advantage of that, too: “Awww, I gained 2 pounds. I’m never going to lose 400 pounds this week. I might as well order an extra double-caramel fudge-nut brownie vanilla sundae surprise tonight….”
The Power of D.U.M.B. Goals
There’s nothing wrong and almost everything right with S.M.A.R.T. goals. You should set a bunch of reasonable goals for yourself and throw yourself into them with all your might. Absolutely.
But…
I think there’s a place in our life for D.U.M.B. goals, too. Dangerously Unattainable, Monstrously Big goals. Goals that not only set us up for failure but virtually guarantee it. Great big audacious goals that make our friends think we’re crazy and our enemies think we’re… well, they think we’re crazy too.
I’m not talking about make-believe goals, here – goals we have no intention of pursuing. Like “Marry Angelina Jolie” (it will happen!) or “Take over IBM and turn it into chain of shoe stores”. I’m talking about goals that fulfill our wildest dreams, goals that are maybe a little too big for us but not completely unattainable. The kind of goals that you have an outside chance of reaching, the kind where you can point to someone not all that different from yourself and say “Why her and not me?”
More importantly, I’m talking about real goals, goals you will throw yourself into, with every intention of reaching them even though the odds are against you. Goals like:
- Triple my income.
- Start a million-dollar company and show a profit by the end of the year.
- Invent something everyone needs and nobody’s ever made.
- Start a website and get 100,00 visitors a day by June.
If you follow the logic of S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting, D.U.M.B. goals are a very bad idea. They aren’t A – Attainable. They’re Dangerously Unattainable, Damn-near Unattainable, Deliciously Unattainable. You’d have to be an idiot to set D.U.M.B. goals – you’re just setting yourself up for failure, and failure, it is implied, is a Bad Thing Indeed.
But I wonder. Has anyone ever reached success without failing along the way? Haven’t the biggest successes had – or at least risked – the biggest failures? Here’s one, off the top of my head: in the early ‘80s, a young Bill Gates stole an operating system and walked into IBM’s offices and told them to buy it from him. I mean, really – some punk kid tried to sell an operating system to the world’s leading computer manufacturers! That’s D.U.M.B.!
Here’s the thing: failing is good for you. OK, not every failure – failing to stop at a 4-way intersection when there’s a semi truck with its breaks out bearing down on the cross street probably isn’t good for you. But in most things, it is failure that teaches us the lessons we need to succeed.
The emotional cost of failing to attain our goals is great, I won’t deny that. But what is the psychic cost of failing against the psychic cost of not setting goals beyond our abilities out of fear and lack of confidence in ourselves? That is, what is the value in not trying because we fear, before the first step is taken, that we’ll fail?
Indeed, what are we setting ourselves up for by playing it S.M.A.R.T.? A life of coloring inside the lines, of keeping all our ducks in a row so that someone else can have the pleasure of picking them off in the shooting gallery?
I’m not telling you to abandon S.M.A.R.T. goals. Frankly, if you want to get something done, S.M.A.R.T. is the way to go. But make sure you also play D.U.M.B. once in a while. Set your tidy attainable goals and then set a couple more beside them, a couple of goals three or four or 20 or 2,000 steps out of your reach. Go for the gold, shoot for the stars, cliché for the cliché!
This year, the smart money is on D.U.M.B. goals.
WRITER'S BIOGRAPHY
Dustin Wax
Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He can be reached though his freelancing site at DustinWax.comDon't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
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Comments
Theron says on December 12th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Actually, the “DUMB” goals you list are really just “SMART” goals, with a wider perspective on what is Achievable.
Tickled By Life says on December 12th, 2008 at 11:34 am
yup! this is a good idea, but i will also need a regular plan for the mundane stuff as well!
Olivia Mitchell says on December 12th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
I love this. I’ve always thought that SMART goal-setting is inadequate and only keeps on being repeated because of the clever acronym.
Ron Towns says on December 12th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I’ve often been asked, “What do you think is the biggest contributing factor to failure?”
I can easily answer that question with one word… inaction.
To succeed, you have to do something, something that will move you toward what you want. When you’re not moving toward what you want, you’re suffering in what you don’t want. It’s like quicksand, and you get stuck there. It paralyzes you, so that just taking the first step seems unachievable.
But the first step is better than the quicksand because it’s one step closer to where you want to be and what you want to be doing. And that inaction is what kills more businesses and relationships than anything else.
Avoid failure… take action!
Check out this great resource I’ve been using to fuel my motivation: http://www.johnassaraf.com/hia. Let me know what you all think!
Amanda Pingel says on December 12th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
I actually wrote an article about this in my journal a couple years ago. It seems to me that sometimes (and for some people), it might make more sense to set a goal that you KNOW you can’t make.
For example, “I will start a company and sell it for $1,000,000.” is definitely an attainable goal. “I will start a company and sell it for $1,000,000 this year.” is clearly not. So it takes the pressure off. You KNOW you can’t do it, so there’s no reason to stress over its possibility or impossibility. No reason to worry or fret about the outcome. You ARE going to fail. So see how far you can get, knowing that anyone who was going to mock or deride you for your failure has already done so.
Here’s the other thing. In 5th grade, my band teacher asked us all to hold our breaths for 30 seconds. After 30 seconds, he asked “how many of you made it?” and maybe a quarter of us raised our hands. Then he asked us to hold our breaths for a minute. After a minute he asked, “How many of you made it?” and no one raised their hands. Then he asked, “How many of you made it to 30 seconds?”
And everyone raised their hands.
So you might not sell your company for a million by the end of the year. But you might get a viable business with steady cashflow, instead of the “well-written business plan and list of potential investors” that you’d written as a S.M.A.R.T goal.
I vote for Damn-near Unachievable Monsterously Big goals for the acronym.
Beverlee says on December 13th, 2008 at 3:50 am
Actually, just following instructions to link to Facebook and it doesn’t seem to be working.
Vincent says on December 13th, 2008 at 5:13 am
Hey Dustin,
You got me laughing over here. Dumb goals are really not attainable and may damage our morale and perhaps cause us to have the perception that goals are not achievable after all. This is dangerous.
Cheers
Vincent
Personal Development Blogger
Hybrid says on December 13th, 2008 at 8:11 am
This is my kind of thinking. The one thing I love that has served me well is setting “Dangerously Unattainable, Monstrously Big goals” (usually on instinct, and with no forward planning).
I can’t remember ever having failed with one of these, as I do it so infrequently. When I bought my first home at 22, I thought “it’s highly unlikely, but it’s possible”. I was on a tiny salary, my lease was nearly up, and now I’ve lived here over five years. I’ve had to make sacrifices, and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.
Recently, I was looking for graphic design training I could do part time, and that wouldn’t take too long to complete. Within a few days I’d signed up to a top of the range course which will see me ready to start work (arrogant as it may sound, I know I have the talent for it) in five months or less. Thing is, this is eating all my disposable income. I have, however, never felt more positive about where my life’s going.
It is true that you get what you wish for. And if you wish for big things, you get big things. They might bend you and test you, a little or a lot, but when you’re faced with something that means the world to you that you HAVE to do, somehow you find the resources. And if you wish to be mediocre by making mediocre plans, mediocre is what you become.
I think it’s great that some people have a more natural tendency for working slowly and steadily towards their goals, and it’s something I’m trying to learn to do. But there’s definitely something everyone can learn (and gain) from doing things this way.
Now I need to get to work on my next stupidly big goal that has a next to no chance of happening, and shall report back if it does! Thanks very much for the excellent article.
Anon says on December 13th, 2008 at 11:48 am
This is great if your goals don’t depend on others. Try being a successful, PAID musician.
Kevin says on December 13th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Dustin,
Interesting post. Perhaps Jim Collins’s BHAG is somewhere in the middle between SMART and DUMB goals – in fact he distinguishes between good and bad BHAGs (“big hairy audacious goals.”) Perhaps your readers would find his approach and the distinction he makes between goals set with bravado and those set with understanding…
http://tinyurl.com/655vze
Dustin Wax says on December 13th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Anon: I live in Las VEgas, where there are thousands of opportunities for paid musicians, but I don’t think that playing a lounge at the Tropicana is what you have in mind. Thing is, there *are* successful, PAID musicians out there — really, really well-paid, loved, popular musicians. It’s a DUMB goal, but a goal that a lot of folks achieve. Consider, say, Axl Rose, who doesn’t seem to have much going for him when he decided to be a rock star — laugh at _Chinese Democracy_ all you want, the man had the luxury of spending over a decade on the album because of what anyone would have told him 25 years ago was a totally unattainable goal.
It’s not just musicians — writers, actors, and artists too operate in a field where only a handful achieve audacious success. But some do, nad it’s only by setting your sights on it that you have a chance. And frankly, if you hope to have a top 40 album and you “only” get a top 100, or maybe you “only” get a career like Richard Thompson’s, who has never had a hit record yet has done what he loved since 1968 — well, that’s not so bad is it?
Dan Erwin says on December 13th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Dustin: You really got my attention on the failure issue. Learning is always, always, always about failure, as far as I’m concerned–and the research, too (sorry, but my background is heavy on learning theory).
The real issue on failure is learning from it. And Wow. . . can that be tough! The sad fact is that we rarely learn from failure–unless we plan to learn from it. That may not make sense in the first read, but it’s true.
Quentin Barton Beaseley says on December 13th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I think this article is simply delicious! It presents both sides. It tickles the funny bones. And…best of all it actually is based in reality! Sure we all need some SMART goals but to balance why not have some seriously DUMB goals. Truth be told…come on now you realists, we all have some DUMB goals on a regular basis. Maybe intentionally. Maybe not.
But at least for now and maybe for my New Years Resolutions (which I have always thought was a supremely DUMB idea) I will set some truly DUMB goals and celebrate when I don’t achieve them! Ha!
A local university called me late this summer pleading for my services as an adjunct for freshman comp. I said I could teach 4 classes with ease and the gentleman I was speaking with laughed and asked, “What are you Superwoman?”
Anyway I took on two there, and then two more at a community college and then two more with an online university AND I completed a graduate level class in contemporary southern fiction for my own pleasure. (with an A I might add.)
Superwoman my foot! Yes my schedule was hectic
But I got it done and the students got what they paid for. Some people said my eyes were too big for my stomach so to speak and had I set out saying I was actually going to accomplish all that many would have said I had set a bunch of DUMB goals for myself.
What I was doing was taking advantage of opportunities as they came along. What’s DUMB about that?
And you know what? Next (in less than a month) I am preparing three pieces of art to display in a local art gallery.
One of my DUMBest Goals is to complete the PhD I’ve been working on for 4 years in 2009.
If I keep up the work pace I’ll never get it done but hey it’s a great goal!
I’ve been living this way for around 56 years now and so far so good!
Three cheers for Dangerously Unattainable, Monstrously Big goals!
Quentin Barton Beaseley says on December 13th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Looks like I mispoke in a couple of places. If you can edit at your end please fix and “gentleman I was speakng with” and “eyes to big for stomach”
Stephen Martile says on December 13th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I love playing DUMB…. I mean, shooting for the STARS. I mean what’s the worst that could happen, you hit the moon?
A great majority of people shoot for the roof of their home and end up in the house, just below the ceiling. Figures, it must be those SMART goals that’s got them stuck in the house…. :)
DUMB and audacious goals all the way!
Paul Baarn says on December 13th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Though SMART has it’s place it never really inspires me. Now this DUMB thing you’re talking about seems to be all about inspiration. I think those goals are normally very scary, because of the fear of failure, but like you said: failing when the odds are stacked against you isn’t that bad. Now to find those really DUMB goals…
Bamboo Forest says on December 13th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
I like how you underscore the risk of setting vague goals. It’s just way too easy for the mind to find a way to undermine it.
Good point.
Nicolas says on December 14th, 2008 at 4:05 am
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you willl ad among the stars.”, Les Brown.
Setting SMART but ambitious goals is important, even if you might miss them.
I wrote a full set of articles on goals for life and how to pursue them in the Time Management Master blog.
Nicolas
Alpha Novem says on December 14th, 2008 at 8:23 am
I will use this article and the one of past year. I want to be a person again with goal that change my life in a positive way. Please check my blog and tell me if I made DUMB goals. I”ll appreciate your thoughts.
Eadwacer says on December 14th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Isn’t that what Ghengis Khan said: Man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
FrugalNYC says on December 14th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
What a SMART post on a DUMB idea! Thanks Dustin!
Mary McKinney says on December 17th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Either way, the important thing is to set and strive for goals. Wandering aimlessly the ineffective way to proceed.
Eric Sherwood says on December 17th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Great article, Dustin. Setting goals that can be achieved without a lot of hard work is pointless.