Can You Live Life Without Goals?

80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by the second week in February.

That’s a scary statistic considering how much effort businesses spend on goal setting. If we can hardly make it past a month on a resolution, do the goals we set at work really stand a chance?

Here’s what you’re up against if you live your life based on goals:

• The “Positive” Treadmill
  You hit your goal! Great! Enjoy your 5 seconds of satisfaction and then move onto the next goal. It never ends.
• The Negative Treadmill
  You missed your goal! You suck! Enjoy your misery and then move onto the next goal. It never ends.
• Measurement Bias
  Peter Drucker famously said “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Gee whiz, thanks Peter! You’re creating an incentive to ignore the great opportunities that are tough to measure.
• Juking the Stats
  People try to stick to goals even the goals stop making sense or when there are better opportunities present.
• The Game of Telephone
  C-level take a week to set the company goals. VPs take a week to set department goals. Managers take a week to set team goals. Individuals take a week to set their own goals. Then it goes back up the chain for approvals. By the time it’s done, the quarter is almost over, no one remembers their goals, and it’s almost time to begin the process again.

Don’t get me wrong. Goals have their place. They’re fantastic if you have a straightforward task like building a piece of IDEA furniture. But they start falling apart when you things get more complex (e.g. the Renaissance happened despite the goals of the church).

In the next post, I’ll start talking about some alternatives to goal-setting.