Be smart: set some NON-SMART goals!

If you are reading this, you are probably already familiar with the world-famous acronym SMART related to personal/professional goals. For those of you who still don’t know, S.M.A.R.T. gives criteria to guide in the settings of goals, a mnemonic acronym first proposed by George T. Doran in 1981, so a goal/objective should be:

• Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
• Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
• Achieveable – Attainable and not impossible to achieve.
• Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
• Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved

(There are alternatives for each letter, like “A” could be assignable, agreed, ambitious, attainable… you got the point).

Sure, those “guidelines” can be useful for normal goals set by normal people in normal daily life, but sometimes we need more, something different from this standard. I’m not just talking about great masterpieces, inventions and empires build by enlightened and dedicated people: I’m talking about something you’d really like to achieve, beyond your “usual” expectations.
Usually, it goes this way: we plan to achieve some goals (hopefully not the Positive New Year Intentions that often fails), we set parameters, schedule a strict timeline and try to do our best to follow our plans. But we are not machines with the same routine and same mechanical (psychological) status every day; we need more maintenance and (inner) motivation compared to robots, and there’s more: despite our continuous investigation on ourselves, we don’t really know our mind (and body) and all our responses against some stress or unforeseen events. So, sometimes trying to achieve those goals can be frustrating, when facing real life – and, for some of us, it can also produce a backlash that make us reduce the ambition for the next goal (and if realism is good, limiting ourselves too much is not).

Nevertheless, I suggest a counterintuitive approach for at least a few goals in our life: do not care and exaggerate!
I’m not saying “dream big (and fail fast)”, “be foolish” or other nonsense claims so naïf and so 90s: I am a pragmatic and rational person, so I’ll try to explain better.
Just as utopia serves to give direction (and can perhaps be reached later by a better civilization and with superior means we now don’t even imagine), so we should (at least once in a while, in some areas we care about) set ourselves ambitious goals to the point of not being achievable. In order to provide a quick example: starting last year, I set out to read 52 books, obviously a quite large number: not only compared to the average number of books a normal person read during a year, but specially considering that almost all the titles are “non-fictional”, often stuff to study or even to put into practice with homeworks (e.g.: meditation or designing your life) – if you’re interested, this is my updated books list.

Yes, last year I failed and, in this moment, I am exactly at the same point where, last year, I almost abandoned reading. Should I feel guilty or depressed or angry against myself for not achieving the result? “No, of course not! But maybe…” (as Louis CK would say). Jokes aside, I don’t feel like blaming myself. If I missed the goal I set myself, it means that probably, in the last part of the year, I was enjoying something else: we have a limited amount of time, so focusing on something means missing something else. For those obsessioned by FOMO, I really suggest reading books like “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman and “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life” by Mark Manson. The point is: I didn’t read the books I set myself to read because I was doing something different from reading, like playing music, drawing, learning something new by courses (quite a lot), cooking combining totally different ingredients, hiking, exploring/discovering the world… and just chilling/relaxing! As a (beginner level) practitioner of mindfulness, I totally agree with one of the last study on contemplation positive effects (paper here). Anyway, yes, I accept the fact I ended last year with “only” 35 new books in my mind (and usually in my notes), as well as I accept that I’ll die without reading great books (building an immense “Antilibrary” like Umberto Eco – FOMO I am not afraid of you!).

So, what’s the purpose of those NON-SMART goals?

As with utopia, our not-too-SMART goals serve to give us an indication and maybe they can be achieved by a future better version of ourselves who has developed other skills or is able to apply them more effectively. OK, but meanwhile… should I accept my limits? And so… what’s the point of setting those almost unachievble goals? Is this just daydreaming?
Here lies the importance of those more-than-ambitious objectives: we should still try to achieve them, providing a good direction and without getting discouraged in case we fail. After all, we must remember ourselves that one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. I mean: even if it’s often better don’t compare ourselves to others (so to avoid Keeping Up with the Joneses and other stuff that could lead someone to chronic dissatisfaction and/or psychological disorders), it could be useful, in similar cases, to check how our numbers (or quality, if not measurable with numeric parameters) compare to others, just to have an idea. In this case, I took a look at the average of books (US) people read in a year:

So, basically: it turned out tht my floor (35 books in a year) is almost 3 times higher than someone’s ceiling (obviously, the graph above display an “average”, so there could be someone who read 365 books during last year; also: there’s very likely a large number of people who haven’t touched a single book, whereas a few voracious readers read more than 25 books).

So, even I feel a little bit disappointed with my self since I didn’t reach my goal, I ‘m not ashamed of having read much more than an average person. My self-esteem is safe and I can still trust myself: time to set another NON-SMART goal! 🙂

A last word: there are some areas in which a NON-SMART goal makes sense, but I strongly suggest to NOT apply this reasoning to something strictly realted with physical health; e.g.: DON’T try to set a goal like “I’ll lose 10Kg in a month” without the supervision of a doctor or a trustworthy professional.

After reading this, what’s your next non-smart goal?

“Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.”

Eduardo Galeano