Goal Success Criteria – Start with the Outcome in Mind

Ok, there’s the adventure in ‘just setting off’; no one can deny that; but the reason for the excitement in this case is precisely because of the danger and the risks you will face. You want to face the uncertainty and emerge the hero but the goal you end up achieving may not be the one you set out to achieve. The best known example of this is probably Christopher Columbus when he set sail for the East Indies and ended up in America! In that enterprise the Goal was to get to the East Indies and allow the Spanish a faster seaward access route to the spice trade that was monopolised by the Arabs and the Italians. What happened was something more significant, the discovery of the Americas, Barbados to be exact! Christopher Columbus had greatly underestimated the circumference of the earth when he set off and when he landed in Barbados he believed he was in the East Indies. So a goal was achieved but not the one he or his investors desired.

This leads us to the fact that one person’s failure is another person’s success. This is so because we all have different levels of ambition in our goals. An entrepreneur who aims to make £1.5 Million next year may feel he has failed if he only made £1M. To most people this would be a tremendous success. When we are setting our business or personal goals we need to start out with the end in mind. This means that we must think deeply about the successful achievement of our goal. What will it look like? How will it feel? What will I be able to do then that I can’t do now? What will I have compared to what I have now? Notice that each of these questions is a deep probing question that begs a descriptive answer. From such descriptions we can extract the criteria that tell us how to measure our Goals achievement. For without this, in many cases, we simply don’t know if we have achieved our Goal yet or how far along the road we are to achieving it. Success criteria are the best way to determine the later stages of progress towards the goal. The question they ask is like that of the impatient children who don’t know the distance to our destination and incessantly repeat the question ‘are we there yet?’

An easy way to determine success criteria is to make a list of the benefits that will come as a result of the goal. Once you can feel all of these benefits then you have achieved your Goal. For example, let’s say your Goal is to ‘Start an online business’. The benefits of achieving this Goal might be ‘being my own boss’, ‘working from home’, ‘earning more than I do now’, ‘not having to spend 2 hrs travelling to and from work every day’ and ‘spending more time with my family’. Each of these benefits can be measured but notice that the Goal is not achieved until all these criteria have been met. In this case we might be our own boss, be working from home, spending more time with the family and not wasting 2 hrs each day travelling to and from work. However, the goal won’t be achieved until you are earning more than you were before. Therefore, when you are thinking of your Goal, also think of the benefits of the goal and think of the end right from the start. Good luck.