Have you recently created a set of clear, written goals?

Most career advice emphasizes the idea of writing down measurable goals that one then pursues with laser focus. This is said to be the key to success in work and life. However, is this advice sound?

In a post on his website, Tiago Forte pondered the idea that we have reached the Death of Goals. He starts by lamenting the continued assumption that SMART goals are the be all and end all of achievement.

Every time I bring up “SMART goals,” I can see the light go out in my students’ eyes. An unmistakable feeling of dread and aversion fills the room, and the decline in energy and enthusiasm is palpable. They know they should set goals that way, but they don’t want to.

The SMART framework was developed 44 years ago by a director of corporate planning at an electric and natural gas utility – not exactly a paragon of modern business in the information age.

I knew traditional goals were an outdated relic of a bygone era, but I hadn’t figured out what to replace them with. After all, they seem like such a load-bearing pillar of modern society: you set an objective, you make a plan, and then you follow the steps to get there. 

To Tiago, a possible solution lies in the book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, by Kenneth O. O. Stanley and Joel Lehman. For the authors, goals are fine when the project is about incremental improvement or completing rote tasks. However, the value of goals collapses when the scope of possibilities grows larger.

The problem arises when we try to scale up this modest strategy to greater achievements – those that involve true ambition, novel invention, innovative breakthroughs, or pushing the frontier.

These are the kinds of pursuits in which goals lose their power, and can actually become counterproductive and lead you in the opposite direction of progress.

To understand why, it’s helpful to think of achievement not as creating something completely new from scratch, but as searching a space of possibilities.

Tiago believes that goals work best when the environment is well defined. The problem comes when we encounter undefined and unknown conditions. As technology and society advances in unexpected directions, a reliance on goals can be a dead end.

For the most interesting, exciting, impactful achievements, goals are a false compass, distracting you from the highest potential directions. They induce a narrow tunnel vision, eliminating the serendipitous discovery, unorthodox creativity, and breakthrough innovation that are most valuable.

In other words, the best path through the vast hall of possibilities is not a straight one; it’s a twisty turny wild ride of daring leaps and hairpin pivots that would seem positively crazy to any outside observer.

The article ends with Tiago’s six steps to think outside of goals. These steps allow people to appreciate the value of interesting problems and expand their realm of thinking to a broader range of possibilities for success.

Read the full article to learn more about the limitation of goals and a possible alternative for progress.

So, what is your non-goal?