How to Make 2019 a Success – ElPropósito2 min de lectura

Goals, purpose, plans, dreams, hopes, targets: what comes first, and what do they share?

I like to plan, and I also love the thrill of reaching or beating results. Today my planning has one main ingredient: enjoying the journey.

December is when goals meet thoughts of "what do I want to have achieved by December 2019." It’s a month of gratitude, celebration, sharing and reflection. Some results may have fallen short (overly ambitious goals, for example), and others may have been exceeded. Congratulations.

Understanding and aligning a few concepts can improve our odds of getting the results we want, so let me lay them out:

• Purpose: I recently wrote about "The Purpose of What We Do." I think starting to do or build anything without a powerful reason, a why or a what for, is one of the main reasons goals stall halfway. Our purpose holds our values and our vision of who we want to be in this world

• Goals: this is where we put down our hopes, dreams and ambitions for the short, medium and long term. Three keys matter for reaching them. First, feeling that what we want to reach is captured in the goal. Second, alignment between the goals and the purpose of what we’ll do. Third, focusing on every area of our life. A set of goals in tune with what we deeply want in life, written down and written well, with an impact on the balance of our life, has a better chance of being reached and probably exceeded, and will directly affect our wellbeing. There are several techniques for writing a good goal. One is SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. I like to add a term Jim Collins coined in Built to Last: a goal should also be a big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG)

• Plans: a plan is the detail of what needs to be done to carry out a project (Larousse, 1994). This is where the dates and specific activities go, the scaffolding for building our goals. Depending on how complex or challenging a goal is, the plan can be very detailed from the start or built up over time as we gather more information and ideas. Carrying out the plan is our responsibility alone, and it gets done through hard work and the discipline to complete activities on schedule

Picturing December 2019 with all our goals met is achievable. Starting from that image and building it from today is in our hands and within our potential.

What do you want to achieve in 2019?

A hug,

Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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