Winning Small and Winning Big
There are two philosophies of goal setting: one says you should set big goals, the other says you should set small goals. In fact, both are important and you should combine both philosophies, to win both big and small. Here we will show you how and why.
1. Philosophies of Setting Goals
There are two philosophies of goal setting: Setting big goals and setting small goals.
1.1. Philosophy of big goals
The philosophy of big goals recommends to set big, long term goals that inspire. Some people call them BHAG. BHAG stands for a big, hairy, audacious goal. BHAGs are long term goals that ensure people can come together around a common vision. Examples of such BHAGs would be sending a man to the moon, winning the war against cancer, curing HIV and eliminating hunger.
People that are known for having set inspiring long terms goals are Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. When Apple released the iPhone, Steve Jobs did not just want to create a phone with new features but wanted to revolutionize the way we communicate.
When the first Tesla car came out Elon Musk did not just want to create a better car, but make the transportation green and thereby help save the planet. Similarly, with his company SpaceX he not only wants to upgrade rockets but wants to allow regular citizens to go to space.
All of the above are big vision goals that can inspire a whole company or even a whole nation.
1.2. Philosophy of small goals
The philosophy of small goals recommends to set small, actionable goals that can be accomplished with one simple action. By accomplishing many small goals in a row you will eventually be able to accomplish big goals.
An example of this philosophy is Lair Hamilton, who was once holding the record for surfing the highest waves of over 65 ft (20 meters). When asked on how this was possible, he replied that he never aimed at surfing such big waves. When he started as a child he just wanted to surf a 5 ft wave, after that a 6 ft wave, after that a 7 ft wave and when he had already been surfing on a 60 ft wave it did not seem scary at all to surf a 65 ft wave.
This illustrates that small goals can indicate the next step and thereby finally lead us to the ultimate big goal.
2. Why Should You Follow a Small Goal Philosophy?
If you’ve ever wanted to accomplish a big vision goal, you know that getting started can be a bit of a challenge. For one this is due to that fact that you might only have some vague idea of how to get started with the first step. Even if you know exactly WHAT you want, you do not know HOW to achieve it.
Or perhaps you sit down to think about everything you have to do to achieve the big vision goal and get completely intimidated, freezing up and feeling incapable of taking the first step.
These are typical problems of focusing on the big vision goals. As soon as you break the big vision goal into projects, projects into tasks and tasks in small actionable subtasks everything becomes easier. These small goals do not seem intimidating anymore and you can easily identify what to work on next.
Desmond Tutu once wisely said that “there is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” What he meant by this is that everything in life that seems daunting, overwhelming, and even impossible can be accomplished gradually by taking on just a little at a time.
The strategy of breaking down big goals into small goals is also what the most successful video games do. In these games there is some big prize to be captured at the end, but in order to achieve this you have to have a high level of mastery. If the game would let you challenge for that prize right away you would give up quickly as you do not have the mastery yet. So good games start out with small prizes to be achieved by a low level mastery and continuously increase the mastery required as you increase your skills. This keeps you and other players engaged from start till the end.
Those are the reasons that small goals are beneficial and even necessary.
We can illustrate the benefit of small goals as follows:
3. Why Should You Follow a Big Goal Philosophy?
The problem with small goals is that they can lack the power of big goals in bringing people together around a vision and motivating people to do their best work as well as making people happy by just thinking about the future where the big goal has been achieved.
So if you do not have big goals and just work on small goals every day, even though you are accomplishing many of these goals every day, it can still be a frustrating experience. This is because you do not see why you are doing all of this; you are just getting tasks done instead of accomplishing something major.
Imagine for example the engineer of the Project Apollo that had the mission to go to the moon not know about the final purpose and only know that he has to work on making equipment a little bit more durable. He probably has to work long hours only to be able to hopefully improve the equipment just a little bit and he has to tell his family that he has to spend overtime at work only for changing the durability of the equipment.
How different does it feel to that engineer if he is working toward the grand goal of being the first country to land a person on the moon? And how different does it feel to tell his family that he has to work overtime so that their country can win in the cold war against the Soviet Union?
Similarly, imagine the difference between the motivation of an engineer at Tesla who only gets told that he has to reduce the weight of the lithium battery by 100 grams versus him being told that he is working on a critical project to save the planet by having greener transportation?
This kind of big motivation and unity of people around a vision can only be achieved by big goals.
We can illustrate the benefit of big goals as follows:
Thus, we see that big goals are very important. At the same time we have already seen that small goals are very important.
In fact, both goals are very important and we need to have both simultaneously.
4. How To Set Big and Small Goals?
To set big and small goals you need to ask two questions: WHY and HOW?
Asking the WHY question brings you from small goals to the big goals. This is called the bottom-up approach. Asking the HOW question brings you from big goals to small goals. This is called the top-down approach.
For the right setting of goals you need both the top-down as well as the bottom-up approach.
I would recommend doing the following steps:
● Write down your small goals, those goals that are actionable and that you need to work on over the next month.
● Bottom-up: Going from these actionable goals ask yourself what are the larger projects that you want to accomplish by getting these tasks done. And why do you want to accomplish these projects?
● Set big level goals: From the above exercise you will already have identified some of your big levels goals. Then ask yourself what other big goals do you have? In particular go over each of your life areas and identify your top level goals:
○ Friends & family
○ Finances
○ Personal development
○ Spirituality
○ Health & Fitness
○ Career & Business
● Top-down approach: Once you have identified all top level goals, try to see what projects and actions are required to get these goals accomplished by asking the question HOW. Then write these tasks and subtasks down.
Following the above steps you will create a goal pyramid. You can read more about this here:
“Why You Should Have a Goal Pyramid and How to Create One?”
The questions HOW and WHY are the two key questions to establish coherent big and small level goals.
