I had a friend in high school who was incredibly bright. He graduated with something like a 99% average.
He received a Rhode Scholarship at University of Oxford and went on to start and later sell a successful tech company.
Interestingly enough, he’s the one who taught me the basics of HTML when I was 14. Those little lessons, written on literal pieces of paper, were what set into motion what would become my career as a marketer.
But that’s not the lesson of today’s story.
The lesson was something he said when I asked him after graduating high school what his “secret” to success was.
He told me he likes to set “arbitrary goals”.
There was something so… unassuming his response. And yet, it intuitively makes a lot of sense.
His answer sticks with me nearly two decades later, so I guess it made an impact.
His goals – call them arbitrary, even if they were extremely high, forced him to back up his actions in order to get there.
It seems like the word “arbitrary” is used because whether he hit it or not, he had a target to aim for and coming close would still make him successful.
So what goals can you set, whether it be a number of inputs (i.e. blog posts per month) or a lagging outcome, like monthly revenue?
It might just get you closer to where you want to be.