Permissionless goals — A happier way to achievement
How are you doing with your goals right now? It’s late January at the time of writing this and I’m hoping the wheels haven’t completely fallen off the wagon for you right now, but if you could do with a little tightening up I thought I’d share a new way to go about your goals with you.
When we go for lofty goals that excite us, we often end up being pulled towards aiming for things that actually are output based, they’re lag measures of what are lead inputs.
Leading inputs are actually the things that drive the lagging outputs. The lag outputs will take care of themselves if we focus and master the lead inputs.
However not all lead inputs are made equal. Some are in our control, which is what we ideally want, but some are not. Let’s look at a simple example of the latter.
Let’s say you want to write a best selling book. That’d be nice. But let’s look at this closely, being a 'best seller’ is actually a lagging output. It depends on book sales and that depends on other people. We need other people’s compliance for us to achieve the goal, in this case we’re at the mercy of customers hopefully buying our book. This kind of hoping and wishing is not what we want.
Instead, let’s gain back control of the goal so we’re not relying on things outside of us giving us permission, such as customers choosing to buy or not buy our book.
So how we might do this is by aiming instead of writing to be a best seller, we’ll now write to create a book we’re proud of sharing.
This new goal now is absolutely down to you. It’s all about your input and ultimately your own opinion. It’s therefore all within your control.
So with this said, if we want to increase our achievement levels and want to retain a sense of control along the way this is the way to do it.
We want to go for goals that are leading measures based on our inputs and that have everything to do with our effort, and therefore have nothing to do with external outcomes such as people giving us permission.
I call these permissionless goals. No one or no thing is stopping you from doing them and therefore achievement (or lack of!) is all on you. Now isn’t that a better way to go about your life, being the cause not the effect? I think so.
So now what is a process we can go through to help us construct our next permissionless goal? Well, thankfully Ali Abdaal has a neat set of questions to shape our thinking. Let’s take a look.
- Why? Why is this goal important to us, why does it matter. Get to the real underlying emotions here when answering this.
- Can you make it into a SMART goal? Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant/realistic and timely.
- What’s a habit it can be matched with? For instance as you drink your morning coffee, can you do your goal’s input alongside it.
- How surprised would you be if you failed? If you wouldn’t be surprised, then you have a deeper problem to fix!
- What would the top 3 reasons for failing be? Be honest and future project. How would you trip yourself up?
- Who can help you? A coach, an accountability partner, a friend?
- How can you increase your success probability? Be specific as you can.
- What’s the action you can take right now to move forward with this? Even the smallest thing is better than nothing.
So next time your about to plot a path to a goal, make it permissionless and increase your chances of actually achieving it.
