How did Our Goals Become so Big?

Below is an excerpt from a book that I’m working on that explores a new paradigm for productivity and goal setting that’s in greater alignment with you.

If you resonate with this excerpt, please let me know what stood out to you in the comments or connect with me on Instagram @emily.perron.

It happened at my small round kitchen table in Stillwater, Minnesota. It was the beginning of 2016 and we had just lived through a cold snap. One where you are glad that it’s 0 degree Fahrenheit. I had left my corporate job about six months prior and was struggling to get going as an entrepreneur. 

I had just finished a session with my business coach where I was stressing out that I wasn’t accomplishing enough. I hadn’t done enough in my first six months after leaving my corporate job. Even worse, I didn’t know what that meant. What was enough? 

I had been setting goals, trying different things, and it felt like I was spinning my wheels. In that coaching session, I saw how I had been connecting my self-worth with achievements and productivity. I know now that I am not alone in this. It’s easy to do in a culture that says the more you do, the better you are. But there was a catch — the more I did, the worse I felt physically, mentally, and emotionally because I couldn’t sustain the pace of life I was chasing. Sound familiar? 

That’s when I began an intentional process of redefining some words in my life, especially around goals. 

You are probably familiar with the fact that, in the English language, there are a few ways we use the word goal. 

So I turned to the Merriam-Webster dictionary for clarification. According to them, the first definition of a goal is “the end toward which effort is directed.” Next, it also refers to “an area or object toward which players in various games attempt to advance a ball or puck” or “the act or action of causing a ball or puck to go through or into such a goal” or “the score resulting from such an act.” And third, it’s the “the terminal point in a race.”

In the beginning, I was most interested in that first definition. And while it’s pretty neutral, it doesn’t tell us much about effective goal setting. However, below the definition, there is a section on similar words such as purpose, intent, and objective. 

For each word, there is guidance for when to use the word. Purpose “suggests a more settled determination.” Intent involves “clearer formulation or greater deliberateness.” Objective “implies something tangible and immediately attainable.”

And here’s what it says about goals: a “goal suggests something attained only by prolonged effort and hardship.” Ah, there it is. The implicit meaning of goals. 

This line inspired me to trace the thread back to see how and when the word goal came about. I was curious about how we got to a place where the word goal came to mean “something attained only by prolonged effort and hardship.” How did one word end up with such different (yet related) meanings? I guess you could say I was trying to determine whether the chicken or the egg came first. 

What I found is that the word goal comes from Middle English, which is a form of English spoken from roughly 1150 to 1450 common era. To give you some context, the original written account of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable by Thomas Malory was written in Middle English. As were Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. 

Originally, the word goal was spelled gol and used to indicate a boundary or limit, such as in a race. Today, this is still the third definition of the word in Merriam-Webster. Apparently, goal first appears as a written word in the mid 14th century. Given this origin, it’s easy to see why the word goal transferred to the area where points are scored in sports such as hockey, soccer (football), lacrosse, etc. And then, it takes a couple hundred more years to reach the first documented use of the word goal figuratively to mean achieve a way or course. 

It’s worth noting here that these are very conservative estimates of the origin. The use of the word goal in both of these forms is likely much older given how expensive writing materials were and the printing press hadn’t been invented yet. 

On a walk in the woods near my house one wintery day as I was processing all this information, it struck me that no wonder our culture is obsessed with big goals. The word itself has a competitive origin. 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that goals have become bigger and bigger, especially at large companies. In Built to Last, Collins and Porras mentioned that Ford Motor Company’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal in the early 20th century was to beat General Motors. That’s it. It’s almost as if they are competing on who could achieve the most. And it’s because they were competing. 

And I get it. There is so much pressure to get ahead. Large corporations, small businesses, mom and pop shops, solopreneurs, creatives, freelancers, individuals of all backgrounds are experiencing it. 

This is trickling down to us personally as well. How often do people compare their goals achieved (degrees, job titles, children) with each other? The next time you are at a party or celebrating a holiday with friends or family, notice the conversations. What kind of updates are people sharing about their lives? About their children? You don’t have to change it or judge it. Just notice it. 

So how did we go from a race line to “something attained only by prolonged effort and hardship?”

A dictionary can be a helpful tool but it’s ultimately only reflecting the meanings that people give to words. That’s why you are free to redefine any word you like. Our culture may not accept your definition universally, but that doesn’t mean you can’t adjust them. 

As I started to explore my own personal definition of goal, I found that one of the biggest challenges surrounding the word in our culture is that we aren’t using it consistently.

Sometimes, we use the word to refer to the big things we envision having, doing, or accomplishing in the next few years. Sometimes, we use the word to describe actions we intend to take or plan to take this month or within the next year. And sometimes, we use it to describe our daily and weekly actions, such as writing a blog post or getting groceries.

Another thing I have noticed about goals is that they are binary. You either achieve them or you don’t. Sometimes, people try to make goals a bit less restrictive by giving them ranges such as good, better, best. 

I have tried this. In the fall of 2019, I hosted a job posting challenge. The idea was that you could write a super effective job posting in a week. The challenge was free. And my thought was that people would try to write their own job posting, discover how hard it was to hire, and then join my new membership program for support with finding their next freelancer. 

It was my first time hosting a challenge and I was so excited because I had known a few people who experienced a lot of success with the strategy. At the onset, I still believed that if you want to achieve big things, you have to set big goals.

So I set my sights on 100 participants for the first round. A business coach I was working with at the time introduced me to the idea of good/better/best. I was familiar with the concept from my corporate days, where it was called threshold, target, and stretch goals. So I settled for 50/75/100 participants as my goals. 

In the end, 10 people participated and four joined the membership. Now, this could have meant I failed. It also could have easily spiraled into thinking I was a failure. But this time was different. Something shifted within me when my business coach gently challenged me about my goal. This time, I saw that my original goal — and even the good/better/best I had tried — weren’t realistic. 

With hindsight, that coach was encouraging me to think differently about goals. She wasn’t saying, “Think smaller.” She was saying, “Be gentler with yourself, Emily. You don’t have to push so hard to be successful.” 

The truth was: I was already successful. It didn’t really matter how many people participated in the job posting challenge. What mattered is that I showed up, hosted the challenge, and learned from the experience. 

My realization that my goals around the challenge weren’t realistic allowed me to experience much more appreciation for every participant. Each individual who signed up and trusted me to help them with their job posting mattered to me. 

And… It turned out that 10 participants was far better than 100 because I was able to develop long-term relationships with them. That probably wouldn’t have happened if I had to interact with 100 people. 

This also represented a bigger turning point in my journey — a shift from quantitative to qualitative goals. 

You see, up until that point, I had always focused on the numbers — or quantitative metrics. Revenue, number of sales, etc. Now I can see that our culture heavily values numerical goals because they can be tracked and measured more easily. You always know where you stand with a quantitative goal. It’s objective. But no one tells you how limiting they are by only being numerical. 

But it’s not the only type of goal that matters. Qualitative goals matter, too. Qualitative goals are still inherently binary — you either achieve them or you don’t. However, qualitative goals can be much broader because they are more about doing something or not. 

In the case of the job posting challenge, the goal could have been to host a job posting challenge or even just to host a challenge. No numbers. No metrics. Just whether or not I did it. Instead of 100 participants — if I had set my goal as hosting a job posting challenge, I would have been successful because whether or not I hosted it was in my control. 

It’s important to point out here that the numbers were never in my control. I couldn’t make people sign up for the challenge or buy into my membership program. Even the big names with the most persuasive marketing messages and tactics can’t control their numbers. 

While there are techniques for making goals less binary, such as good/better/best, I haven’t found a way to fully remove their binary nature. There always seems to be an element of pass/fail.

In part, this is due to the amount of momentum behind the concept. Remember, the first documented use of the word goal beyond sports and games was in the 1540s. And that’s just what has survived in writing. It also was probably used verbally long before then. That is a lot of momentum to overcome. 

Plus, I love goals. I wouldn’t necessarily change everything about them. What concerns me the most is the way our culture believes goals are “something attained only by prolonged effort and hardship.”

At this point, I have chosen to accept the binary nature of goals. Through extensive experimentation in my own life that began at 11-years-old in my sixth grade classroom, I have found a way to live in greater harmony with my goals. It’s a way to use goals that’s more aligned with my nature. 

There seems to be a common belief in our culture that we need big goals to be effective. That by setting a big goal, we will achieve more than if we didn’t set it. And, even if you didn’t accomplish the big goal, you were better off because at least the goal brought you further than you could have gone on your own. 

This was the drumbeat of my corporate experience. I encountered this personally on a regular basis. Time and again, the “leaders” were setting completely unrealistic timelines for the projects I worked on. 

It started like this: Create an unrealistic project but justify that it’s realistic. Put everything you have into trying to meet the arbitrary milestones. When it becomes apparent that the project is impossible, change the timelines or scale back the scope of the project. 

It’s such a strange paradox. On the one hand, we achieved so much. And on the other, I constantly felt like I was falling short. I was achieving and failing at the same time, all the time. 

For me, and many of my co-workers, this treadmill made it difficult to celebrate any achievements at work. Every achievement felt like losing because we weren’t set up for success. We were set up to lose and then actually losing by not achieving everything we set out to accomplish. 

However, just because a belief is common doesn’t mean it’s right — or right for everyone. 

Unfortunately, this was a big part of my breaking point for leaving my corporate job. And luckily, it was a turning point in my life.