The Beauty of Defining your own Success
As we start a new year, many of us are creating our New Year’s resolutions. This is a yearly ritual that I sincerely look forward to. Typically, around the end of the year, I have off from work and school, which makes it the perfect time to figure out the path I want the next year to take. I do this by creating a set of concrete goals for the year, which, together, define success for the upcoming year. This way, I fend off burn out and accomplish my goals in an efficient and enjoyable way.
Discovering your Hopes
Hopes are things you want to accomplish. Don’t get bogged down worrying about the how, just discover your “what”. Sometimes these things can be obvious, for example, any student is going to want to get all A’s in their classes. To help find these hopes, look at every aspect of your life. I break my hopes, and then my goals, into a few categories: personal, career, academic, and financial, but, because you’re not me, you may need different categories. Think about what you spend time doing during the year, and think about your interests and hobbies. How do you want to progress?
Transforming Hopes into Goals
I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’ve heard of SMART goals, but if not, welcome! This acronym is an elegant way to create useful goals. Evaluating your goals using the SMART method turns hopes into action items. Think about one of my examples, “I hope to learn French.” There are too many questions on how to go about realizing this! To quantify these, look to the SMART principles.
Specific
Specificity means that the goal must be concrete and have defined end criteria. Is this goal specific? Not really, what does learning French mean? Do you want to sound like a native speaker, or do you just want to have a working knowledge of the language? Defining these terms will make the goal specific. I have been learning French for quite a while now, and I want to improve my listening comprehension over the next year.
Measurable
The measurability of a goal defines how easy it is to track the goal. Every goal needs to have some way of quantifying the progress. Is this goal measurable? Not really, how do you know you’re making progress? Are you going to take quizzes every 3 days to check your progress and record the scores, or are you going to track how much time you spend each day practicing? Every goal needs numbers. For my goal of improving my French listening comprehension, I will record how much time I spend listening to French and write monthly reflections on my perceived improvement.
Attainable
Now’s the time to reflect on your goals. Let’s say you’re setting your goals for the year, is it possible to achieve this goal in one year? Or, per our example, if you decide you want to spend 1 hour a day practicing French, where does that time come from? Perhaps, if you work 8 hours a day, work out for an hour, eat dinner with your family, and have a side hustle, it might be unrealistic to commit to 1 hour a day of French practice. But maybe 15 minutes is more attainable. For me, I frequently spend 30–60 minutes a day watching American television, so I see it as fairly attainable to just replace that with French television.
Relevant
This principle is also the product of self-reflection. Why are you pursuing this goal? If finding the “why” of the goal is difficult, abandon the goal because there are much better ways to spend your time. For me, I love the French language, and I’m Cajun, making French part of my culture, so it’s very important to me to keep up with learning it. And I have found that I am much stronger at reading and writing French than hearing it, and I want to change that. Your “why” does not have to be this sentimental, perhaps your goal will further your career or your health or any number of things that are important in your life.
Time-based
Lastly, the goal must be time-based. This must be pretty evident after reading the other principles, but the goal needs a defined deadline and time commitment. Making these commitments help tremendously with planning when you will accomplish your goal once it's in place and life starts picking up. The time commitment for my goal is 30–60 minutes a day for at least 183 days and the deadline is 1/1/2022.
Let’s turn my hope into a SMART goal! Try something like, “I will improve my French listening comprehension skills because I enjoy the French language by spending 30–60 minutes a day for 183 days until 1/1/2022 listening to French speech and writing monthly reflections on my progress.” Do you see where all of the SMART principles come into this sentence? I’ve put some more of my SMART goals for 2021 in the appendix.
I don’t mean to say that there is no place for hopes and dreams, in fact, starting with hope can help build a really great goal! But don’t expect to simply accomplish a hope with no SMART goal to go along with it.
Tracking your Progress
Now is the time to set up systems to track your goals! For most goals, there are platforms that can take this data for you. For example, if you have a fitness goal, perhaps use the fitness app on your phone or even consider investing in a FitBit. Or if you have a language learning goal, perhaps try Duolingo. If you have a reading goal, try out Goodreads. And, of course, most financial goals can be tracked at your bank or with a well-updated spreadsheet. Some things, however, you might have to create your own tracker. A fun example of this that I’ve seen is the 100 Days of Code challenge, where you have to post what you work on every day. But it can also be even simpler than that, perhaps, if you want to track how often you post on your blog (or maybe that’s me), put a small note in your calendar each time you post.
Knowing when to Stop
Now that we have these trackers in place, you can define success! For some goals, this might be when you consider the project finished for the time being. For recurring goals, like our French-learning example, it might be when you decide to take a break between sessions. If you’re like me, I find it extremely difficult to choose stopping points in my work and will happily work forever, but I know that this will make me burn out over time, so creating these stopping points for myself is extremely helpful and sincerely lowers my stress.
Where’s the Beauty?
If you’ve gone through this whole process in your own life, you’ve eliminated the ambiguity of your hopes and dreams and turned them into goals! No longer will you get lazy in February and forget about your resolutions, and no longer will you work much harder on something than you need to and sacrifice your self-care. You have set your own expectations concretely and reasonably, and you will reap the benefits!
I want to hear about your goals, leave a SMART goal in the comments!
Appendix
Personal
- Exercise 4 times a week for 27 weeks until 1/1/2022 to improve my health
- Read a book a month by reading before bed 3 nights a week for 27 weeks until 1/1/2022 because it is good for my mind and will help with my sleep
- Improve my French listening comprehension skills because I enjoy the French language by spending 30–60 minutes a day for 183 days until 1/1/2022 listening to French speech and writing monthly reflections on my progress
Academic
- Maintain a 3.5 GPA by attending all lectures and studying for at least 4 hours a week per class on top of regular classwork
- Stay on track to graduate with M.S. in May 2022 by passing all of my classes in the same fashion as above
Professional
- Get a full-time offer after graduation by being a great intern at my current company (in pursuit of a return offer) and, just in case, applying to 20 jobs during the 2021–2022 school year, tracking my applications in a spreadsheet
- Write a blog post a month by picking a free day every month where I sit and write the article start to finish because I enjoy writing and want to build my blog
Financial
- Put $6,000 in my Roth IRA by saving $250 out of every paycheck (to add up to $500 a month)
