Every goal you craft or decision you make should start with why. Simon Sinek speaks about the idea of finding and articulating your why in his famous TED Talk, “Start With Why.”  He is arguably most well-known for his quote, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”  He challenges people to truly understand why they do what they do whether they are a Fortune 500 company or an individual person.  

When I think about the idea of starting with why, I think about values; the ideas that have meaning to you and are important in your life.  I use this idea to define my why.  Identifying your why, or your key values, is not an easy task and I am still working on improving mine every single day.  Thankfully, I have an incredible mentor and friend in Ric Sweeney who challenged me as a student at the University of Cincinnati and helped provide me the tools to search for my values through an activity called a Values Sort.  This is an incredibly simple and fast activity to help identify one of the most complex parts about you (free print version).

1. Review each of the values listed, and make up any additional that are missing.    
2. Create three piles for “Not Important to Me”, “Important to Me”, and “Very Important to Me”.
3. Set a time for five minutes and sort these values cards into the three different piles.  
4. Remove the “Not Important to Me” and the “Important to Me” piles.
5. Remove the least important of the “Very Important to Me” cards. 
6. Continue step 5 until you are down to your final value.  At the end you should be able to look at the last few values that you would have kept, identifying what your most important values are. 

Throughout this process think about how you naturally act in your professional and personal life.  While this activity is not perfect and does not include every single value in the world, it is a starting point for anyone trying to find their values.  This activity is what helped me identify the eight cornerstone values in my life. 

• Relationships
• Community
• Mental Health
• Physical Health
• Education
• Adventure
• Professional
• Financial

When these areas of my life are in order, I am successful and fulfilled.

Step 2: Setting Your Big Hairy Audacious Goals

One of my favorite books of all time is Good to Great by Jim Collins.  Throughout this book, Collins presents his decades of experience and research to assess one question: how do good companies become great?  However, every concept that Collins’ proposes can also be applied to your own personal life and leadership, almost as if you are treating yourself like a company.  

The goal-setting concept that I use from Good to Great is the idea of setting Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs), a goal-setting concept that is used to describe President John F. Kennedy declaring his mission to take people to space in his iconic “We choose to go to the moon” speech of 1962.  Collins’ describes these type of goals as something that is easy to grasp, compelling, stimulates progress, and should be arguably unreasonable. 

1. Look to the future – When setting these BHAGs I look out towards the future first.  What are the long-term goals you are pursuing in each of your values categories?  What are the unrealistic dreams that you want to accomplish?  What is your moon shot?

2. Focus – Once you have identified the BHAG in the distance, refocus on the BHAG that is only one year away that progresses you towards that longer goal in the distance.

3. Get tactical – Once you have your one year goal within target, identify the tactical goals that you have to accomplish on the quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even daily basis that drives you towards the end long-term goal.

Rinse and repeat this process until you have a clear long-term goal, short-term goal, and know your tactical objectives that get you there.  

Step 3: Goal Evolution

After you develop your BHAG, you have to now figure out how you are going to work towards completion.  This is where Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, proposes a concept called “Goal Evolution” from his book Principals.  Dalio’s idea consists of a 5-step process to take a goal all the way through to accomplishment.

1. Have clear goals – Make sure that your BHAG is specific.  You need to know where you are trying to go before you can begin moving in the right direction.

2. Identify and don’t tolerate problems – Don’t avoid your problems.  Confront the brutal facts and write them down.  Have a clear understanding of what is getting in the way right now from you accomplishing that BHAG.

3. Diagnose problems to get at their root causes – Ask yourself why a problem exists.  That is likely not the real problem, but an effect of the root cause.  Use a tool like a fishbone diagram to have a clear understanding of what the real problems are.  

4. Design a plan – Create the plan that will allow you to overcome your problems and accomplish that goal.  This may be as simple as a daily set of tasks.  You don’t have to spend a long time creating this plan.  Keep it stupid simple and do what works best for you.   Share your goals and your plan with the people that will hold you accountable.  Robert Glazer, a thought leader in business and personal development, shares a study identifying people who share their goals as improving their likelihood of completion by 76.7%.

5. Push through to completion – Execute.  You have set your values, built your goals, created your plan, and now all you have to do is execute.  You have planned your work, now work your plan.  In Good to Great, Jim Collins writes about the idea of the flywheel effect.  He discusses how goals aren’t accomplished in one big moment; they are accomplished through the daily action of small tasks, “the relentless pushing of a flywheel.”

Step 4: Build Your Team

Every great organization, from a Fortune 500 company to a World Series-winning MLB team, has one thing in common.  They have a great team just like any great person has people around them that supports them and holds them accountable.  This idea was originally taught to me in the idea of Brotherly Love through my fraternity, SigEp.  Motivational speaker Jim Rohn also speaks about the concept of a person being the product of the five people that you spend the most time with.  His idea is often related back to the statistical concept called the law of averages.     

I think of this idea similar to a company’s board of directors.  The people that you surround yourself with are your “personal board of directors.”  Any good board of directors should have skills and opinions to provide you with, support to offer you, and the willingness to hold you accountable. 

1. Identify one person for each of your value areas.  This person should be passionate or skilled in this space already.  You likely already spend time talking with this individual about topics in this area.  
2. Complete step 1 for each value and take a holistic view of your board.  How does it look?  Are you missing someone that should be a clear addition?  Maybe you want to add a different perspective or outlook to your team.  Identify these additional people and recruit them as “at-large members” just like any other board of directors.  
3. Reach out to all of the people you have identified and explain what you are trying to accomplish, how they can help, and why you value their opinion.  
4. Create a feedback plan with everyone on your personal board of directors.  This could be a standing monthly phone call, cup of coffee, or anything else.  The goal is that you are dedicating time for reflection and planning to each value area with this person on your board of directors.    

Step 5: Create Visuals

The last step in setting and accomplishing your goals is to create visuals through the power of visualization.  Find a picture that symbolizes success for each of your goals and post it somewhere where you will regularly see it.  The world is a visual place, and your goals should be as well.  When you can visualize an idea, your chance of success drastically increases.  I will always believe that you get what you’re looking for in life.   

Wrap Up

Creating and crushing goals is not an easy feat.  Setting goals can be a goal in itself, but you have to start somewhere.  I will be the first to say that my goals aren’t perfect, and they likely never will be.  But I will set them every year, accept feedback, and try to improve them regularly.  Identify your values.  Set your Big Hairy Audacious Goal.  Build a plan.  Recruit a team.  Harness Visualization.  And crush your goals.