Why Most People Suck at Goal-Setting
Why Most People Suck at Goal-Setting
How I got my blue belt in less than a year.
When I started Jiu-Jitsu, the only goal that I set was to get my blue belt as soon as possible.
When I started writing, my only goal was to “make money” as fast as possible.
In both cases, I didn’t really know what my goal meant. In both cases, I achieved my goal, and it came at a great cost to me down the line.
My problem was and has been that for a long time, I have been very good at achieving goals but not very good at setting them.
This fault has caused some of my top successes and my biggest failures, and meditating on it has also led me to realize my biggest room for improvement as a person.
I think what I’ve learned can help you too.
Let’s dive in.
How it all started…
On Sunday, I made some people on X (formerly Twitter) quite mad at me.
I said this:
“If you're a BJJ white belt, the goal of getting your blue belt is not a “good” goal. It’s the easiest goal. Easy goals lead to taking the easy way out.”
Basically, what happened is that the white belts (who are like how I was) were offended, thought I was being preachy, and some people even accused me of “black belt privilege”.
And look — it might not have been my best-worded tweet, but considering that I train at a gym where I haven’t worn a gi in nearly a year and I get tapped out by purple belts all the time, I definitely wouldn’t consider myself this super privileged black belt. In the gym that I train at, the fact that I have a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu is nothing more than something fun to put in my Instagram bio. It’s nearly meaningless.
But either way, I think about the things that I post, and I was wondering where the disconnect came from between me and all the people who read my tweet.
It hit me like a ton of bricks the day after the original post:
Getting my blue belt in Jiu-Jitsu was easy for me, and that wasn’t a good thing.
Whatever you want, you will get.
I’m a believer that whatever you want in life, you can get.
The more that you want something, the more likely that you are to get it.
The only caveat is that the more things that you want, the less likely you are to get them.
Although it might bother you that getting my blue belt in Jiu-Jitsu was easy for me, I was also 19 when I did it, set up my whole life so that I could get as much mat time as possible, and I trained only at a gym in Oregon every day that I chose because I knew that it was the easiest way for me to get my blue belt.
(Damn — that felt good to let out.)
When I got my blue belt, I knew that I had cheated myself. I earned the belt, but I wasn’t really a blue belt in terms of skill.
When I started writing, I had the same dilemma.
I was a fresh college graduate and I read on a website called Medium.com that writing was a great way to make money online while being able to control your schedule, so I jumped in headfirst.
Within a month, I was “making money” — a few bucks on Medium, a few bucks ghostwriting rifle scope reviews for $25 a pop, and $45 a week writing social media content for a lawn care company.
Again — I got what I wanted — but the goal that I set was bad. The goal that I set meant that my first digital writing paychecks were less than $100 per month.
Here’s how I learned to set better goals.
The anatomy of a goal.
The beautiful thing about setting a goal is that it puts you in a position where you have to change to achieve it.
Every goal that I have set and pursued has fundamentally changed who I am — for better and for worse.
My goal to compete in the highest levels of no-gi Jiu-Jitsu changed the way that I think about training and competing. My goal to make better money as a ghostwriter changed the way that I think about writing, time, and value.
All goals force you to change.
Good goals bring out the best in you.
Bad goals, on the other hand, might make you take the easy way out — like they did for me.
For me, at 19, my goal was to get my blue belt.
I did whatever I had to to achieve this goal, but it did not allow me to reach my long-term goal of getting really good Jiu-Jitsu. When I moved back to Chicago from Oregon in 2016, I had a blue belt, but I didn't have the skill to perform at the level that I wanted to.
That was another goal that I chased that changed me — but I learned far more from pursuing a high level of skill than I ever did from chasing a piece of fabric to keep my gi together.
Oh, and by the way, I still got my black belt faster than most people. I just became more interested in the skill than in the external markers of skill.
In writing, I had a long period of not being able to really monetize my work because I wasn’t really a writer — although I thought I was.
It’s an iteration of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, I guess.
You don’t know what you don’t know — and that’s why I’m trying to tell it to you.
But don’t think of me as think of the bible, think of me as a little reminder to always embrace your lack of understanding.
Closing Thoughts
The reason why most people struggle with goal-setting is because they set goals that are outcome-based, as opposed to setting goals that are process-based.
They don’t set goals that are designed to help them get better at their skills, they set goals that are designed to help them get results that satisfy their personal vanity metrics. The tragedy is that when they achieve their goal, they experience an increase in confidence and self-expectation that they can’t actually earn.
I thought I was a professional because I was earning money — even though I couldn’t pay my rent at the time.
In my experience — whether it’s competition, training, writing, or my personal life off the mat — I’ve found that the best way to increase happiness, skill development, and long-term motivation is to avoid attachment to outcome-based goals.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t have those goals — I go into every ADCC Trials expecting myself to win and I wanted my black belt until the day I got it — but it does mean that you need to be more focused on the actionable goals that are going to get you to your endgame as opposed to the endgame itself.
Approach training holistically. Approach improvement as the true end goal.
Or, in the words of those annoying Instagram influencers who make you want to claw your eyes out, “Focus on the journey, not the destination”.
The Grappler’s Diary is sponsored by BJJ Mental Models, the world’s #1 Jiu-Jitsu podcast!
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