Goals are not Created Equal

I love checklists. To mark off a completed micro-task gives me satisfaction and an accompanying dopamine jolt. Calendars often drive my goal-setting. Every September, I set school-specific goals for curricula, teaching methods, and community building. Other people begin their goal-setting cycle in January as they adopt resolutions, often ones that include exercise bikes or fitness mirrors. For a certain subset of the Church, Lent resurfaces the issue of goals, this time the focus is not on acquisition but release. The goal question becomes: What should I give up for the next six weeks? Lent 2019 I gave up grumbling and complaining; it was a long forty-two days. Unfortunately, Lenten deprivations, New Year’s resolutions, and even September classroom aims have this in common—too often they fail to generate lasting change.

Goals have an uneven reputation. One statement I keep hearing is “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems” (James Clear’s Atomic Habits). While I will unpack this statement in greater detail in the next two posts, I want to think now about why not all goals are created equal. The annual goals in my Hyatt planner underscore each day’s “three key tasks.” At least in theory, these goals are “good goals,” and they should, when compounded over a decade, become a life.

If attainable, effective, and habit-forming “good goals” exist, what then are “bad,” or at least ineffective, goals? I have uncovered four telltale signs of a “bad goal”:

·      A BAD GOAL is mere aspiration, intention, or imagining. It is may be beautiful, but it is ephemeral. Bad goals glitter like fool’s gold; these “fool’s goals” have no real value.

·      A BAD GOAL lacks clear action steps. Without steps to measure progress, the goal proves too haphazard to forward an actual life. 

·       A BAD GOAL is one that is too readily attained. Valuable goals involve challenge or stretch. The goal achieved without effort is also one easily jettisoned.

·      A BAD GOAL is one that is all negation and no affirmation. To give up grumbling (as I did in Lent 2019) without adding to my life thankfulness or another positive attribute made me a grumbler on vacation and not an affirmer. (We see this pattern in Ephesians 4:28 where Paul tells the thief to become a laborer, not just a retired crook.)

We have now reached a place of hope, because once we can pinpoint components of bad goals, we have opened the door to understanding and seeking good goals. No wonder Paul says, “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:14). Come back for the next two posts as I discuss how to pursue worthwhile goals to the glory of God.