If you read biographies of successful businesspeople and listen to those that analyze successful businesses and organizations you will find that a common thread is long-term business goals. But not just setting them. Not even sticking to them for awhile. But sticking to them for the long-term and seeing them through.
Obviously that’s easier said than done.
How do the best stick to their long-term and well thought out goals?
Here are a few insights.
1. Focus On The Specific
Sometimes long-term goals can be kind of vague. It’s good to make goals that are specific. But even if you have a pretty specific goal it could still take some tweaking so that you’re focused on the specifics of the goal.
For example, you may want to hit a certain revenue goal for the company. That is pretty specific. But you may need to dig deeper by figuring out different ways you can generate revenue that will allow you to hit that goal. You may also need to figure out how long it could take to happen or what might occur or what you could do to change that timeline.
2. Find The Meaning In The Goal
Meaning is important to people. If you can’t figure out why doing something is important to you then you’re going to have a difficult time sticking with it. If money isn’t important to you for some reason, then hitting a revenue goal might be difficult. You won’t be excited by it.
So, you’ll have to find the meaning behind the revenue goal. Maybe you love helping people. Hitting a revenue goal could be a way to help your team experience new success in the personal and professional lives. Now it’s not just about the money. You found the deeper meaning.
3. Revise With Experience
Goals can change as time goes along. But it’s usually a good rule of thumb that you don’t want to change your goal. the case where you might want to revise is if you’re gaining experience and learning that the process of achieving the goal isn’t leading to good outcomes.
Try not to change the goal. Try to revise it.
Maybe the goal was to become the biggest manufacturer of golf balls. But as you got into the manufacturing process you realized that your team and company were really good at producing a golf ball that was great for practicing. You could change the goal to become the biggest manufacturer of golf training aids.
4. Identify Distractions Along The Way
Distractions can kill your ability to pursue long-term goals. Distractions come in all forms. They come from outside forces. But they also come from within. Sometimes when we aren’t fully committed to a goal we can find little ways to sabotage our attention. We focus on what seems urgent and use our energy to work on that instead of focusing on what we know is the best long-term path.
So make sure to schedule time to analyze the distractions in your life. This will help you get back on track if you need to.
5. Audit Your Routines
Also set time to audit your routines. We can set a goal and set daily routines to get us there. But as time goes by we slip into different routines. We stop doing what needs to happen to achieve goals and instead we can kind of wander through work and life and not get things done.
Schedule time, perhaps every 3 or 6 months, to audit your routines. They might be fine, but usually you’ll need to tweak things to get back working toward your long-term goals.
Conclusion
Long-term goals are good things. We know that. But they’re so difficult to achieve. A big part of it is probably the fact that they are so far off. Even if we break a big goal into smaller goals and achieve them one by one, we still often find it difficult to stick to something for a really long time.
But it can be done. And generally it seems that people feel very accomplished when they are able to stick with a long-term goal. So hopefully these little insights can help you along your path.