How to hit ambitious goals

 

Whether you’re in a work meeting, a self-improvement group or at the gym – goal-setting is a big thing. We’re told again and again that it’s key to our success.

Likewise, we’re repeatedly told by top athletes and celebrities that we ‘just need to believe in ourselves’ and we can achieve anything. You might think it’s a new idea, developed by the self-help industry, but military leaders have been using this logic for thousands of years to encourage their followers to charge into battle.

Goals and self-belief are great – really, they are. But they aren’t enough on their own. In fact, they can lead us into a whole load of trouble.

Dr Christopher Kayes, of the University of Washington, coined a term – goalodicy. It’s a form of blindness driven by our goals.

Kayes writes about the Mount Everest disaster, in which eight people died. On 10 May 1996, 34 climbers left camp IV for the summit.

If you leave the camp at midnight, you could aim to reach the summit 12 hours later. But, crucially, you have a turnaround time (dependent of weather and oxygen) at which point you must turn back. If you’re 100 metres from the summit and it hits your turnaround time – that’s what you should do. Otherwise, you’re increasing the odds of not getting back.

On that day, the turnaround time was 2pm. Some climbers didn’t reach the summit until 3.45pm

There were a series of events and errors what led to the disaster, but at each stage, the question was: Why didn’t they turn back?

‘Most mountain climbing accidents happen on the way down,’ says Kayes. ‘The climbers get to the summit, but they didn’t notice this storm coming in.’

If we focus too hard on our goals, we become blind to glaringly obvious dangers around us.

So how do we hit goals without the idiocy?

I’m absolutely not suggesting that you shouldn’t have goals. I’m also not saying that your goals should be modest or ‘toned down’ to make them more achievable.

Here are my three secrets to achieving seriously ambitious goals without going blind …

1. Think big, think tangible

The markets offer huge potential to create real wealth and to build a more fulfilling lifestyle. And we shouldn’t apologize for thinking big.

What do you want to achieve from trading?

I don’t mean goals like, ‘get rich’ … we need objectives that can be quantified. Stuff like:

These aren’t modest goals – they should be a stretch for you, and you should give yourself a reasonable timescale to achieve them in.

2. Be a pessimist: plan for the worst-case scenario

By thinking positively and concentrating on aspiration, we narrow our focus and can lose sight of reality.

It’s a problem that’s common in politics, where goals become such an integral part of a person’s identity that they won’t allow themselves to even consider perfectly legitimate questioning. We’ve seen play out recently in the pullout of Afghanistan, and are experiencing it right now in the UK as repercussions of Brexit are making themselves felt.

Achieving the goal became everything, and worst-case scenario planning went out of the window, because it might look like they lacked enough self-belief.

Of course, it happens for traders too. When we assess how good a trading method is, most of us focus on the profits and pay little notice to the maximum drawdowns in track records, and the impact they could have on our plans. But being prepared for the things that can go wrong means that when it does hit the fan, we’re not phased – we have a plan and we can put that into action.

3. Practise goal elasticity

When a mountain climber hits turnaround time and they are short of the summit, it can be a tough decision. As extra time ticks by, a goal that’s ‘so close’ becomes ‘even closer’ … ‘almost there’ … possibly with fatal consequences. But there are plenty of factors along the way that could mean that goal isn’t achievable right now – weather, injuries, oxygen. And these factors need to be mapped into the plan.

That’s why we need to be adaptable around our goals and the timescale we expect to achieve them in. It’s how we accept those tough moments when we have to cut losses, take a break, re-evaluate.

All sorts of things can get in the way … trades lose, markets get stuck, global pandemics strike. If we focus on our goals without considering external factors, we start taking risks and being careless with our capital.

Goal elasticity means that your plans can change with the changing conditions around them. When we equate this elasticity to ‘giving up’ is when we run into goalodicy.

With these three things in place, you’ll find you can push your goals further, beyond what you thought was achievable.

Look to longer time scales, but more ambitious targets, and factor in tangibility, pessimism and elasticity – without these, your goals are just pipe dreams.

 

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