Stop Flirting with Your Goals

We are a couple of weeks into the new year, and I am more excited about my goals than I have been in a while.

Candidly, that’s not new for me. I get excited about goals every quarter.

What is new is that this time I actually feel like I have a better shot at hitting them.

The old way: big goals, thin plans

My old pattern looked like this:

Set a big, inspiring goal for the quarter
Break it down into a few milestones
Assume that if I hit the milestones, the results would follow

On paper, that sounds fine. In practice, the results were somewhere between “meh” and “I guess that sort of helped.”

The problem was not the goal.
The problem was how I was working on it week to week.

Milestones felt clear in January and fuzzy by February. I did some of the work, skipped other pieces, and then justified it by telling myself I was “still moving in the right direction.”

You can probably guess how that played out.

The shift: from goals to actions

This quarter I decided to try something different.

Instead of obsessing over the goal itself, I asked a more practical question:

What are the specific actions that are most likely to create the result I want?

I stole this directly from Brian Moran’s book The 12 Week Year.
His argument is simple:

Goals matter
But it is your weekly and daily actions that determine whether you ever see those goals in real life

So rather than writing down a goal and hoping a loose plan will be enough, you build a short list of actions you commit to every week.

Think:

Number of sales conversations
Number of times you publish
Number of focused work blocks on your most important project

Things you can count. Things you can either say “yes, I did that” or “no, I did not.”

The weekly score

Here is the part that really clicked for me.

You do not just make a list of actions.
You track whether you did them and you give yourself a weekly score.

If I decided that 10 specific actions make up a “full” week, and I did 7 of them, then my score is 70 percent.

Simple. A little uncomfortable. And very clarifying.

The target I am working with is 80 percent or better.
If I am consistently under 80 percent, that is my cue to change something:

Maybe the actions are unrealistic
Maybe my calendar is a mess
Maybe I am just not taking this as seriously as I thought

Either way, I no longer have to wait until the end of the quarter to find out whether I was actually doing the work.

How this looks in real life

For you, the actions might be different, but the pattern is the same.

Get clear on one or two meaningful goals for the next 12 weeks.
Decide on 3 to 5 weekly actions that are most likely to move those goals forward.
At the end of each week, score yourself on how many of those actions you actually completed.

You are not grading your worth.
You are grading your execution.

And that weekly score gives you something you can adjust in real time.

Try this for one quarter

If your goals usually look better on paper than in your actual calendar, this is my invitation:

Stop flirting with your goals
Start tracking the work that truly moves them forward

Pick a goal that matters this quarter.
Define the repeatable actions that will give you the best shot at hitting it.
Then give yourself a weekly score for the next 12 weeks.

You might find the problem was never your goals.
It was the fact that you were not being honest about your execution.

To thriving,

Zach