About 10 years ago, I was hired by a corporate organization to run a program for their management trainee. Basically, these are the fresh graduates who just landed to their first job for a technical company. Part of the content of my program is about goal-setting. After explain about some basic concept of goal-setting, I asked the participants to write down the goal for their career. To my surprise, most of them wrote down that one day they wanted to become a Superintendent. I was wondering, why that is their aim for their career - not becoming a CEO, or any C-suites, or at least some other different position like General Manager.
Curious, I asked the participants why most of them wanting to become the Superintendent. The answer that they gave, the previous session the day before my session was delivered by their internal staff with the position of Superintendent. Everybody was looked up at him and unconciously decided that they wanted to be like him.
I started to notice that it is not unique to that session in that organization. But that is what natural human being response. Our goal is only as big as the reality that we could see.
I once listened to the podcast The Game of Impossible, where Idris Jala said that when he was a child, he lived in a rural area in Bario, which he regarded as the most remote place in Malaysia. He recalled that when he was a child, he didn't see the world beyond the mountain. But between 1962-1966, there was confrontation; the British soldiers went to their hometowns. These soldiers behave wierdly, they were smoking cigarette, eat different foods, and watched movies. One day, one of the soldiers told him that there are world beyond the mountain, and if you want to get there you need to pass your exams. That was his motivation back then, so he set the goal to study hard to see the world beyond the mountain. Imagine if there were no confrontation and no British soldiers were there, Idris might not become a minister and lead the transformation of the country.
To expand your goal, you need to expand your reality
I am convince that we can see someone's future just by asking them what is their goal.
Here is the thing that most people missed. When we set goal, but with small reality that we might have, we will set small goals. And the main reason is their reality is never been expanded. That explains why sometimes when you were born within a rich community, your goal might be different as compared to someone who lives in PPRT (PPRT is the Malaysian government housing and poverty eradication initiative under the Ministry of Rural and Regional Development (KKDW) designed to help the rural poor and hardcore poor). In fact, there is a term called Economic Connectedness which a concept emerged from the work of economist Raj Chetty which measures how much do people from low-income background have genuine friendships with people from higher-income background.
The core idea is simple. If poor and wealthy people live in a completely separate social worlds, opportunities does not flow. But if they become friends, information, aspiration, norms, mentorship, referrals, and opportunities can flow across economic classes. The researches found that the "cross-relationship" is one of the strongest predictors of upward social mobility ever identified. It is all about exposure.
And the truth is, we cannot get the government or people from authorities to set the environment, but we definitely can choose who we want to be friend of. Some said that we are the reflection of five of our closest friends. That is literally true, because our friends are the one that helps us to expand our reality.
To expand our goal, we just need to expand our reality.
How to set a better goal
First step before setting a goal is for us to understand there are different types of goals. This is something that I learn from Bob Proctor, there are three types of goals:
1. Type A Goal - You know how to do it
2. Type B Goal - You think you can do it
3. Type C Goal - What do you really want to do. (And you don't have any idea how to achieve it).
Type A is the common goal that most people set. They know how to go to Kuala Lumpur. They just set a goal, one day I want to go to Kuala Lumpur. Probably they have been there before. In terms of financial goal, we can set to earn a certain amount - amount that is familiar to us. We have reach the same sales target last year and we just repeat the same sales target this year. We know how to do it.
Type B goal is a bit ambitious. We have never been there, but we know we can figure things out. We haven't been to Maldives. But we know we can Google the information, asked some of our friends who have been there. Or perhaps we have our friends from Maldives that is going to entertain us when we reach there. The thing about Type B goal, it is all about setting the date or deadline. Most people don't set the deadline it becomes a wishlist. In terms of financial, we might not have RM1 million before. We set a target, we want to accumulate RM1 million by end of 2030. It is achievable goal if we put our plan on it.
Type B goals is the one that normally what SMART goal is all about. We set something that we can achieve, realistic and time-bounded.
But Type C goal is a goal that we really want, and most of the time we have no idea how to reach there. Most people are either afraid to set this goal, or they have no idea that they can set this goal. Example of travelling is to go to the Mars. This is what Elon Musk level of goals. He might has no idea how to reach to Mars. But he perhaps will figure it out along the way. In business, to reach RM1 billion sales by 2030. You have no idea and looking at current situation it is not realistic perhaps. But setting that kind of figure will look so much scary and we might think unrealistic. But it requires imagination. Imagination requires us to think, think beyond our beliefs. And to think beyond our beliefs we need hope for the future.
Type C goals require us to change the way we think, grow ourselves as a person, and do things that we have never been done before. It requires us to get out of our comfort zone. We have been in the comfort zone for so long, that we felt so comfortable being there. It is time to set a slightly different challenge to ourselve. But if you asked me, to achieve RM1 billion is still not something impossible. We still can asked a Billionaire how they did it. We can learn and we still can figure things out. But going to Mars, we have no reference point what-so-ever. Never did people went to Mars. So it requires us to think different, be creative and keep on pushing.
So, have you set your goals? Did you set Type A, or B? Or have you consider setting Type C goals?
#johanirwan
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