The Wild Importance of Wildly Important Goals

If you’ve ever done any sort of swimming, you know the difference between diving and a belly flop. With a dive, you punch crisply through the surface of the water. With a belly flop, there is that painful, gut-wrenching slap when you (or hopefully some other braver soul) find out that water doesn’t yield nearly as much as you thought. The reason for the difference is that water has a surprisingly high surface tension, and by spreading yourself out, as in a belly flop, there’s not enough momentum at any one point to overcome that surface tension.

You can spread yourself too thinly with your business too, and find that the beginning of the year has turned into one painful belly flop.

To avoid that embarrassing splat, you’ll want to focus your energy into one or two goals only, in other words: Wildly Important Goals.

When coming up with your goal, use the formula ‘from X to Y by when.’ 

Putting the goal in these terms gives you both a measurable way of seeing if you’ve met it and a deadline to work towards. 

This framework can work with any type of goal. For example, if you have a sales goal, it might be: increase sales from 50,000 units to 75,000 units by December. By breaking it down to these terms, it can help provide clarity as to what it is you’re trying to achieve.

You’ll want buy-in at all levels of your organization. It’s pretty simple when it’s just you, but when you have a larger staff and various teams assigned to different tasks, it can get a little murky.

Choose your goal(s) carefully and decide before hand what it will take to achieve it.  What role does each of your teams play in making the goal a reality? While as a business owner, you will be the ultimate arbiter of what’s ‘Wildly Important’, try to involve your staff as much as possible. For you to achieve your overall goal, each one of them will have to achieve smaller goals.  Including your staff in the decision-making process not only allows you to take advantage of their experience, but also gives them a feeling of ownership in the process.

Focusing on one or two goals requires a good bit of discipline.

You probably have many goals for the coming year, across all segments of your business. Focusing on one goal often means you have to exclude or delay other, often cherished, goals.

Much as you’d like, your business can’t be all things to all people all the time. However, just like the diver, staying locked in on a narrow, achievable target helps you push through the obstacles in front of you. Focusing on the wildly important is about defining the greater goal and what it takes to achieve it.