Thought 48 (e): Long term vs Short term goals

It is a good idea to think in terms of long and short term goals. List on a piece of paper, your long term goals. The long term goals may cover a time horizon of, say, one year - which is a convenient time frame.

However, you may find it more convenient or useful to consider more than one year. There is no hard and fast rule for this. A year, however, seems an easy and natural time period. The important thing is that you must have a deadline to complete your goals. Otherwise, nothing gets done.

Once you have your long term goals set, prioritize them, the first amongst them being the most important. Now, you are ready to set your short term goals based on the long term goals. The short term goals could be the milestones, which, when accomplished successively, you will achieve your long term goals. Each short term goal could be targeted for, say, a month.

Deadlines for goals

All goals must have deadlines. Without deadlines, the rate of effort may be too slow to be of any benefit to you. Deadlines activate you - and you spring into action. They make you give timely inputs and do not allow you to waste time on unimportant activities or in procrastination. Deadlines leave no scope for complacency. However, you should not drive yourself to extreme limits in this process. Do not attempt to achieve too much in too little a time. The stress involved can be counter productive. If you make these deadlines too cruel, you lose fun, excitement and ultimately, faith in this management philosophy.

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Thought 48 (d): The Process of Setting Goals

Goal setting is to be taken as a serious business. It appears easy - but not really. Goals are not mere hopes or wishes. Wishes do not have sufficient energy associated with them to be productive. Goals are commitments. You are going to commit your resources for their achievement. This commitment can be meaningful to you, provided you are able to visualize a corresponding benefit. The benefit must be absolutely clear to you. It is this benefit that continues to motivate action and effort, until you achieve the goals.

Writing down your goals brings clarity to them. You generally have a vague idea at the back of our mind, what goals you wish to pursue. But if they stay in your mind only, they keep changing. They do not take much meaning or seriousness, until you put them down on paper. Writing also makes them take a final and clear shape, as opposed to having them vaguely at the back of your mind. You can never plan firm actions and commitments in a constantly changing situation.

Goals have to be, not only specific but they should be positive. When they are not positive, you need to pay a lot of attention to avoid behavior like "not eating", "not getting angry on children", "not wanting to continue in the present job", etc, which can increase your anxiety and cause stress to you. Vagueness or confusion in goals does not allow you to assess correctly whether you reached them and if so, when did you reach them exactly, to enable you to immediately divert your limited resources to activities waiting in the queue for want of them. For instance, "I want to be a better father", "I want to acquire more wealth", "I want to improve my health" etc, are all vague and not specific.

Another important aspect in goal setting is that the accomplishment of a goal should be under your control. For instance, if you want a better consideration from your boss, it may prove difficult to control his behavior.

Set the goals in a balanced manner. Do not rob one area to enrich another. For instance, if you want to complete a graduate course in 10 months, you may have to undergo considerable stress in achieving your goal, affecting your health and happiness.

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Thought 48(c): Goals for individuals

Actually, any of our daily activities have built-in goals passing examinations, getting up in time early in the morning to go to work, buying a car, getting married, having children, keeping the house and garden clean and attractive, keeping the garbage outside on a specified day, paying bills on time, shopping etc. We are therefore, already goal oriented and achieving goals has become a habit to most of us.

However, the goals that we deliberately set for ourselves should be a little more difficult to achieve - demanding more out of you than a routine habit. The achievement of the goals should be able to bring out more of the latent potential in you. This potential is a lazy or dead inventory of resource. Goals convert it into an active resource, doing work for you - to make your life more fruitful and fulfilled.

In every person, there is an infinite wealth of potential. What we see manifested, however, is infinitesimal. Goals make you work harder and stretch your capacity - translate more and more of your potential into surface activity. This process takes you to places you never imagined that you could ever reach. More than the achievement, the process of stretching and reaching out to your potential is very satisfying.

Your present happiness or unhappiness is the summation of the consequences of various choices you made to date. Your future happiness or success, therefore, will depend on the choices you will be making today. Your goals are your choices.
Goal Setting For Individuals3

There are multiple demands on your resources and your resources are never adequate. There is always a resource crunch in a real world situation. Given infinite resources, any one can achieve anything. However, when there are limited resources - which correctly describes the reality of every day world - it is essential to make the resources produce, effectively and efficiently. This makes it imperative that you choose carefully, from out of the several needs that you may have at any point in time, only those needs over which, you want to utilize your limited resources. This choice depends upon your compulsions, likes, dislikes, priorities and importantly, where you want to go.

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Thought 48 (b): Corporate Objectives and Goals

In a corporate setting, the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more visionary your objectives for the organization are going to be. It is believed that the chairman of AT&T in USA - which is perhaps the largest telecommunication organization in the world had visualized some years ago, the objective, "it is the objective of this organization to provide a reliable telephone service to the common man in this country at an affordable cost". Highly visionary, no doubt, but a chairman of a large organization, such as AT&T, always has to take a helicopter view of the scene; his view has to encompass the entire landscape. The executives of AT&T were able to convert this vision into a reality in a given time frame. They translated this vision into very specific goals for the lower levels.

Actions at the lower levels of the hierarchy will not be purposeful, unless they are chasing very specific targets. When you are low in the hierarchical ladder, like a foremen of a shop, the goals have to be very clear and specific. They should for instance, spell out a production target. Otherwise, the foreman will not understand and therefore, he is not likely to produce what is expected of him.

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Thought 48: Goals

Thought 48 (a)
List your priority needsList Your Priority Needs3

Although, it is easier to manage happiness than adversity, happiness also has to be managed carefully. Things that you seek in life seldom happen by merely wishing for them. They do not happen unless you are willing to earn them - through investment of energy and effort.

There are many facets to life, like relationships, health, home environment, education, finance, acquiring assets, friends, social contacts, social obligations, spiritual aspects etc, any of which, can influence your happiness. All these facets need to be managed. You cannot possibly address, however, all these needs simultaneously. You can at best take three or four of them at a time, for immediate action and address the remaining later.

Address Your Priority Needs FirstAddress Your Priority Needs First3

List your needs and prioritize them. Goals are your urgent needs, which you wish to address immediately. When you attend to your needs on this basis, you add a new meaning, direction and dimension to your efforts. You create a new expectancy and hope in your life, leading to fulfillment.

All happy or successful people have goals in life. They know where they want to go and what is the direction of their ultimate destination. It is said that if you do not know where you want to go, then, almost any road will take you there. You must be clear about where you want to go, if you have to know what to do to get there.

Goal settingGoal Setting3

Setting and achieving goals gives you the feeling that you are in control. You work at your best when you are seeking some thing, which you want to accomplish. You will canalize and direct your energy and resources, productively.

Goals and their achievement is the key for improving your quality of life. It is said that “if we do not have specific goals, we will be almost certain to work for those who have”. We can be anything that we want to be - if we can decide clearly what it is. Strangely, it is also necessary sometimes to be clear about what you do not want – before you are able to clearly define what you want in life.

Goals and objectives could relate to individuals and families as also to corporate entities. They also could relate to a short or long horizon. They could be specific or visionary. When they are visionary, they are commonly called objectives; goals have to be specific in nature. Visions take a long time to become realities; goals relate to shorter horizons.

A goal must be specific – otherwise you do not know if you achieved it or not. If you say that you want to be, say, “a better computer programmer”, the question arises as to what is ‘better’. Goals should be differentiated from results. “I want happiness” is not a useful statement of goal. Happiness cannot be a goal. Your goal should be stated in terms of specific steps, which when executed, will result in happiness.

Once you are able to set your golas, then onwards, you have to keep them under the spotlight all the time to focus on them – without allowing any distractions to disturb your focus. There is a well-known story in Mahaabhaarata (the Mahaabhaarata period is estimated to be about 5000 years ago) about how the venerable teacher Dorna taught and tested his students about focusing on goals. He was the teacher for both the Kaurvas nd Paandavas. One day he took all his students to a forest and called one by one to narrate what he saw on the yonder tree, which he pointed to them. One of them said he saw a lot of leaves; another said he saw a number of branches; and many of them gave this kind of irrelevant answers in different versions - except Arjuna. Arjuna said that he saw the eye of a parrot on one of the branches. Drona said, “Shoot it with an arrow” and Arjuna did it immediately – and the parrot fell at his feet.

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Thought 47: Vital few and trivial many

An Italian professor, by name Pareto, discovered that 80% of the problems, when solved, give only 20% of the total benefit, while 20% of the problems, when solved, yield 80% of the benefit. Professor JM Juran, the American quality management specialist, restated the same principle – as “the trivial many and vital few”. It is a good idea to classify problems into "vital" and "trivial". This automatically decides the priority that any problem merits. Vital problems, of course, get high priority and trivial problems get low priority. This is an excellent management philosophy.

Resources are always limited, generally, for any one individual or for any organization. In a real world situation, you never have enough resources for all your activities. Therefore, you cannot address all problems, all at the same time, to obtain all the possible benefit. You naturally, would like to conserve the limited resources that you have and use them first, to address those problems that give you the maximum benefit. It, therefore, appears prudent to address the 20% high priority (vital) problems first, to ensure that you get the 80% benefit. If there are still some resources remaining, you can attend to some of the remaining 80% of the problems. This is how you make use of the Pareto principle in managing your resources and objectives.

When we tend to do things mechanically without thinking, we get overwhelmed even by trivial problems. A great majority of life’s problems are trivial by nature – and we can solve them by commonsense alone. When you seek help even for trivial problems, you never develop self- reliance, self confidence and self-esteem.

Do not be afraid to “think”. It is so very easy to think. Think big. Big or small, think - and solve problems.

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Thought 46: Running vs. Management

Some of you may have read "Alice in wonderland". Alice is a small girl. In one of the episodes, Alice starts running - running very fast. At some point, she comes to a fork, where a black cat was sleeping. Alice asks the cat, "Mr Cat, Mr Cat, I am in a terrible hurry. Can you please tell me which road I should take". The cat opens one eye and says lazily, "depends upon where you want to go". This irritated Alice. She said, "I told you I am in a hurry. You are trying to waste my time. I don't care where I go. Now tell me which road". The cat goes back to sleep after saying, "Then, it does not matter which road you take". If you do not know where you want to go, all roads lead there.

In management of any activity, you have goals; when you know precisely where you want to go and in what time frame and within what cost budget. Turn the spotlight on to your goal and keep it lighted up all the time. This helps in restoring the focus back o the goal, just in case you get distracted and stray away from it for any reason.

Ralph Evans, the American Consultant calls it "running", when a person moves through life without well defined goals. This person does not know, why he does whatever he is doing. He is willing to settle for anything. It is pointless to undertake any activity without some goals – which relate to (desired) specific results, within given time and cost constraints.

Given unlimited resources of money and time, any one can achieve anything. But in a real world situation, you find that you are always confronted with time and cost constraints. Therefore, it is essential for you to achieve your goals within the given time and cost constraints. Use your resources efficiently and effectively to produce the desired goal or result.

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Thought 45: Clean problems vs Dirty problems

Ralph Evans, the American consultant, once said, that problems can be classified into two types. The first type is called “clean” “Clean” problems are those for which, we can readily visualize a solution. For instance, if your car is giving trouble too often, you may decide to replace it – which is a solution – when the car problem will cease to exist, at least for some years to come.

There is the second type of problems, which are not clean at all. We are unable to see a solution to these problems in the near future and therefore, unable to solve and put them behind us. Since, they are not “clean”, we call them “dirty”. For example, the indiscipline amongst employees in an organization or the political problems in India, problems of terrorism, problems connected with alcoholism and drug addiction in a society, are some examples of problems that do not lend themselves so readily for a quick and clean solution. These can be classified as dirty problems. Generally, all “people” problems are dirty problems.

Every one faces dirty problems at some time or the other in his/her life. For instance, every one encounters difficult people at some time in their lives! To deal with them – is not easy. This is a dirty problem that most of us face commonly – at some time or the other in our lives.

What do we do when we face dirty problems? We know that there are no easy solutions – at least, not immediately. What can any one do except to learn to live with them, until you stumble upon a solution. Some times “time” finds a solution to some problems - and one learns to live with these problems in that hope (which is, time finds a solution).

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