3-Bullet Summary

You’ll benefit more from reading the article the whole way through. But, if you’re pressed for time, here’s a condensed version of The Ultimate Guide on How to Set Goals and Secure Success:

• Goals are incredibly important. This is because they act as the rules that govern our actions. Without goals, we become prone to distractions and manipulation.
• The reason so many people set ineffective goals and end up failing to achieve them is because they purely perceive goals as events as opposed to events and processes.
• There are three actionable steps you can take to create effective goals: set your outcome goals, attach emotions to those outcome goals, and set appropriate process goals.

The Pain of Failure

It’s New Year’s Day. You’re at the dinner table with your friends and family, the scent of roasted meat and potatoes fills the air; ambient conversation lingers.

“What are your resolutions this year?” a family member enquires.

Your brain churns. Visions of six-pack abs, A grades and fulfilling social relationships — everything Strong Students desire — appear before you, evoking a sense of motivation.

You tell your family that you’ll achieve them all.

The next day…

You’re pounding it out on the treadmill. Your feet ache and you’re sweating bullets. After a gruelling hour of cardio, you sit down at your desk and study for 3 hours. “I’m coming for you, goals!” you say to yourself, brimming with hope and hunger.

The next month…

The treadmill’s gathered a lot of dust.

You’re at your desk, like you were the day after the birth of the New Year, but this time you’ve lost your focus. You scroll through social media and laugh at memes. The hunger to study has faded in just one month and you’re back to your old habits.

New Year’s Day…

“What are your resolutions this year?” a family member enquires.

A familiar vision unfolds: six-pack abs, A grades and fulfilling social relationships.

You convince yourself internally that this is the year you achieve your goals, sweeping your attempts in the previous year aside.

But, your systems haven’t changed. You don’t think that last year will repeat itself, yet, it’s doomed to from the start.

Introduction

So many of us have no clue about how to set goals.

How many times have you set a goal with all the motivation in the world only to make no progress and give up?

Lots? Same here! I can’t count how many times I used to set ambitious goals, go in all guns blazing and make little to no progress.

However, when I started researching the science behind motivation, how to set goals and how to consistently achieve them, I escaped the New Year’s resolution loop of death.

My grades improved, I bettered my physical health and I levelled up my financial game and social skills over the course of a few years.

This isn’t me boasting — this is me saying that I’ve got science-based answers to a huge dilemma we all face.

With the framework you’re about to be shown, you will never again set goals that instantly set you up for disappointment.

You’ll learn exactly what you need to do to set actionable goals that won’t leave you relapsing to your old ways on day 2.

So, if you no longer want the pain of failing to achieve your goals, the 3-step framework I’ve designed and put into this guide is for you.

The Two Crucial Types of Goal

Before we can start setting goals and get to the framework, however, we need to draw a distinction between the two key types of goal. If we don’t do this, we’ll end up neglecting the fact that goals are not just events.

Outcome Goals

The first type of goal is the outcome goal. When you think of goals, this is exactly what you’ll default to.

In essence, an outcome goal is an event. For example, “I want to gain 10lbs of muscle this year” is an outcome goal because it is centred around the event of muscle gain.

Outcome goals are important because they facilitate goal focus¹. By this, psychologists argue that if you have a vision of where you want to be, you’ll have a referee overseeing your decisions.

Going back to our example of muscle gain, for instance, if we have this as a clear outcome goal, it will encourage us to resistance train each muscle group 2–3 times per week, eat 0.7–1 gram of protein per lb of bodyweight each day, get 8–10 hours of quality sleep, etc.

However, outcome goals have been shown to be less than 10 times as effective at facilitating performance and achievement than the next type of goal we must be cognizant of²…

Process Goals

Whereas outcome goals are our default, process goals should be.

The previous study cited suggested that process goals are the best tool for driving performance. It also suggested that process goals have the most profound effect on self-efficacy (self-belief).

Other research has indicated how process goals majorly reduce anxiety by alleviating the pressure attached to achieving outcome goals³. They basically equip us with the tools to succeed regardless of our circumstances, contrasting outcome goals, which are often more motivation-based and conducive of short-term achievement.

But what are process goals?

Essentially, process goals are the miniature daily and weekly targets we set ourselves that move us towards outcome goals.

If your outcome goal was to perform 10 bodyweight pull ups, your process goals would be all the components of getting good at pull ups. This means that you’d be practicing pull ups regularly, strengthening the muscles involved in the pull up, and perhaps losing a bit of bodyfat (if you’re overweight) to make pulling yourself up easier.

Although they’re not as sexy as outcome goals, they’re far more important for accomplishing things. This is because process goals are the steps we take towards our outcome goals. Most people neglect taking small steps and incrementally grinding towards their dream outcomes. They dismiss consistent dedication towards a sustainable set of habits. Instead, they lunge violently and end up burning out or falling over.

Simply put, if we don’t engage with the process of goal achievement, then the event won’t unfold.

How to Set Goals

Knowing that goals are not just events, we can approach goal setting in a more holistic manner.

The following 3-part framework will walk you through exactly how to set goals based on this idea of goals as being both an event and a process.

If you take action as you go through it, then you’ll appreciate the true value this guide has to offer and make progress towards your goals today.

Step 1) Set Your Outcome Goals

Outcome goals are guides. They are essentially the referees that dictate how we approach establishing processes.

For this reason, they always come first. It’s impossible to configure your life and habits if you don’t know what to configure yourself towards.

These goals must satisfy 3 criteria:

1. Reasonably unreasonable — Your goals must make you think the following: ‘[Insert goal] is going to be really difficult to achieve, but not impossible’. Be really ambitious, but not utterly unreasonable.
2. Specific — Don’t be vague. The best way to do this is to quantify your goals. For example, ‘In 6 months I will at least be eating 5 fruits and vegetables per day, and at most 10’ > ‘I will eat more fruits and vegetables’.
3. Measurable — You must be able to track your progress towards the outcome goal(s) objectively.

With these criteria in mind, you’re going to write down 1–3 outcome goals that will take you no more than a year to achieve.

These goals will always fall into one of three camps:

1. Health.
2. Wealth/Studying.
3. Relationships.

If you decide to attack three goals, you do not have to pick one from each. You could pick two from one category, for instance. However, the fewer goals you have, the more progress you will make.

Optionally, you will then write down 1–3 outcome goals that will take you 5 years to achieve, as well as 1–3 outcome goals that’ll take you a decade or more. These could be logical progressions from your yearly goals. For example, if you set a studying-related goal to achieve within a year, perhaps to achieve a certain mark, your logical progression could be to achieve an even higher mark in 5 years at a different institution. This would mean you don’t have to adapt your routine as much and can instead focus on getting better at what you’re already doing.

Use the following template as a prompt to set your goals:

‘In [insert timeframe] I will at least [insert the lowest version of the outcome goal you’ll accept], and at most [insert the highest version of the outcome goal you could possibly achieve].’

The reason we’re setting two potential versions (bounds) of a single outcome goal, one more achievable than the other, is to put ourselves into what’s James Clear calls the magical zone of long-term growth.

The lower bound we’re setting (which is still ambitious) gives us hope; the upper bound we’re setting gives us inspiration. Subsequently, if we follow the rest of this guide to a tee, we’re going to probably fall somewhere in the middle — the sacred land in which we surpass our expectations but don’t bite off more than we can chew and burn out.

Step 2) Attach Emotion to the Outcome Goals

With our outcome goals set, we now reach a neglected phase of goal setting: emotion.

In essence, we need to comprehend what that goal will feel like in terms of our senses. There are two stages within this step:

1. Establish positive emotions upon completion.
2. Establish negative emotions upon failing.

Establish Positive Emotions Upon Completion

Research has shown that imagining success can facilitate motivation, confidence and performance⁴. This is because visualisations in which we see our future selves achieving outcome goals build positive psychological associations with the inevitable pain we’re going to undergo pursuing them.

Indeed, research into rats has shown that rodents given hazelnut cream for traversing a runway show more anticipation and desire to expend energy in proceeding exploration tasks than rats given tasteless pills⁵.

Basically, if we know that the journey on which we are about to embark is going to yield metaphorical hazelnut cream at the end, then we’re going to strive to push through barriers as they arise.

Thus, underneath your outcome goals, make a list of 3 bullet points describing what you’ll get if you achieve them and how this will make you feel.

Be totally truthful here and own your desires. If your motivations for achieving a goal are dark, write them down in vivid detail. Describe the exact reasons why you want to achieve this goal and how you’ll feel. No one will judge you because no one’s going to see the page you’re writing on.

Establish Negative Emotions Upon Failing

Nonetheless, visualising and describing our dream scenarios in isolation won’t help us. In fact, positive fantasies on their own during the goal-setting phase can decrease systolic blood pressure⁶. The media nowadays says that we should seek to reduce our blood pressure. However, systolic blood pressure has a statistically significant relationship with energy expenditure⁷. This means that we need our blood pressure to elevate if we want feelings of alertness and drive, which are vital for long-term goal pursuit.

Therefore, although the positive visualisations conducted previously will ignite the flame of motivation, they won’t keep it burning for long and foster continuous progress. Actually, they’ll sedate us and hinder growth if we rely on them.

So, we need a long-term source of motivation, and that’s where fear comes into play.

Although rats feel an initial sense of drive when there are potential rewards available (positive outcome), they feel an equally great sense of drive when there’s a potential punishment, like an electric shock (negative outcome)⁸.

This applies to humans, too. (We’re quite similar to rats, aren’t we?) Within the entrepreneur population, for example, those who visualise failure and the hurdles they’ll face during the pursuit of goals possess a greater willingness to learn and master the processes that go into achieving outcome goals⁹. Therefore, if we’re aware of the fact that the road to our outcome goal will be covered with ruts and sharp turns and we may not achieve it if we don’t embrace these difficulties, we’ll not only strive to better prepare ourselves to avoid failure and try harder, but also become more resilient when setbacks arise.

Therefore, next to the 3 bullet points describing the positive emotions attached to success, write them again but with the following preceding words:

‘If I don’t achieve this goal, I won’t [insert positive consequences of outcome goal’s accomplishment].’

Step 3) Set Appropriate Process Goals

You now have outcome goals, short-term motivation (positive emotions attached to the outcome’s achievement) and long-term motivation (negative emotions attached to the failure to achieve the outcome).

Next, we need the steps to get to the outcome goals, so we must divert our attention to process goals. This is the most effortful part of the goal-setting process but by far the most important.

The goal of this step is to reverse engineer your outcome goal. Here’s how you can go about doing so in 7 simple steps:

Step 3.1) Identify the Core Fields

Each outcome goal is comprised of a set of core fields.

For example, if you set the outcome goal ‘In a year, I will at least graduate with an A, and at most an A*’, you’d identify the pillars of being a successful student:

• Studying and writing (i.e., the tools needed to nail assessments).
• Health optimisation (i.e., having an energised, productive body).
• Productivity strategies (i.e., getting more results out of less work).

Specifically, you need to identify 1–3 core fields.

If you’re stuck identifying what fields go into an outcome goal, here’s some advice:

• Look at people who’ve already achieved your outcome goal and uncover what they did to get there.
• Ask yourself the following question: ‘If I had already achieved this goal, what would I be doing on a daily basis?’ Once you identify the habits, group them into their appropriate fields.
• Imagine that someone else was asking you for advice on how to achieve the outcome goal. What would you tell them?

Step 3.2) Break Down the Fields Into Their Constituents

With the fields identified, you must now ascertain the constituents (parts) that comprise them.

Continuing with our example of achieving at least an A, we identified the fields of study-related skills, physical and mental health, and productivity.

Let’s zoom in on study-related skills. It is comprised of the following constituents:

• Writing/Essay skills.
• Effective revision strategies.
• Researching skills.
• Learning from experts, like teachers.

Every field is forged out of several constituents. Your job is to identify the 3–5 important ones.

Step 3.3) 80/20 the Constituents

The 80/20 rule simply means dedicating your time, energy and resources to the small handful of things that yield the most results.

We’re going to apply this rule here by highlighting the 1–2 constituents that will drive us most quickly towards results in our field.

The following prompt will be very helpful if you’re stuck:

‘If I was a master at [insert constituent] but was mediocre at [insert other constituent(s)], would I get great results in the field of [insert field]?’

For example:

‘If I was a master at researching skills but was mediocre at writing/essay skills, would I get great results in the field of studying and writing?’

If the answer is no, then that constituent is lower down the list of importance than the one(s) you compared it with.

Although each constituent is important, there will be 1–2 that really turn the needle. In our case, writing/essay skills and effective revision strategies are the most important for becoming masters at studying and writing, so they’ll be highlighted.

Step 3.4) Break Down the Constituents Into Strategies

With your list of 3–5 core constituents, 1–2 of which are highlighted as especially important, you now need to transform them into strategies.

This step is one of the most important, because you are now listing the actual things that you can act on to get results.

Within study-related skills, we identified effective revision strategies. We knew that in order to be a successful student, we not only have to study hard, but also study using time-proven methods.

So, we must now understand the strategies behind effective revision:

• Active recall-based strategies, like flashcards.
• Spaced repetition.
• Generation (i.e., using your own ideas and examples).
• Interleaving topics on a daily basis.
• Practicing exam questions.

Like when we broke the fields down into their constituents, we only need 3–5 strategies. If we list more than 5, then we’re probably selecting niche strategies that don’t deliver the majority of the results within the constituent of the field.

Do this for all the constituents you identified.

Step 3.5) 80/20 the Strategies

This is the most important step.

With your list of strategies, you’ve now got to identify the 1–2 with the most leverage (i.e., apply the 80/20 rule to them, like we did for Step 3.3).

let’s quickly recap where we are and put this task in context:

1. We identified the core fields for being an A-grade student and zoomed into the study-related skills field.
2. We then broke that field down into four constituent parts, highlighted the two most important parts, and further zoomed in on the effective revision strategies element.
3. Most recently, we deciphered the strategies underpinning effective revision.

We identified these strategies:

• Active recall-based strategies, like flashcards.
• Spaced repetition.
• Generation (i.e., using your own ideas and examples).
• Interleaving topics on a daily basis.
• Practicing exam questions.

Now, we need to decide which of these strategies are most likely to promote mastery of the field: study-related skills.

If you need a prompt for this step, answer the following question:

‘If I had to get incredible results in the field of [insert field] but could only dedicate 2 hours per week to the strategies underlying it, which 1–2 strategies would I pick?’

In our case, we’d definitely pick active recall-based strategies, because they’ll most effectively enable us to remember key information, and we’d also select practice exam questions, because they’re specific to how we’re going to be tested.

Spend time thinking during this step. Don’t lie to yourself and pick a strategy just because it’s fun or easy. You must identify and highlight the strategies that have a 100% chance of driving great progress if you’re consistent with them.

Step 3.6) Frame the Strategies as Process Goals

At this stage, you need to transform the strategies you’ve identified into process goals.

To do this, use the following prompt that’s been slightly adapted from the one used for Step 1:

‘Every week, I will [insert strategy] for at least [insert the smallest and most realistic amount of time you could execute the strategy for], and eventually progress this to [insert the ideal amount of time you want to eventually dedicate to the strategy].’

For example:

‘Every week, I will practice exam questions for at least 1 hour, and eventually progress this to 10.5–14 hours.’

By changing strategies to process goals, you now have an actionable framework.

Ensure that the lower bound you set is incredibly realistic. You need it to be realistic because if it’s unrealistic and you burn out, then you won’t be consistent, and consistency is what breeds results. Moreover, you won’t have the motivation to strive for the upper bound and make progress.

Step 3.7) Incorporate the Process Goals Into Your Routine

All the hard work is now over.

You know the fields that underpin your outcome goal, the constituents of those fields, the strategies within each constituent, and what those strategies look like as actionable process goals.

The final step is understanding how we’re going to take action, because it’s useless knowing what to do but not developing a plan to turn knowledge into results.

At this point, I’d strongly advise progressing to The Ultimate Guide on How to Achieve Goals and Forge Habits. You’ll obtain science-based advice on how to implement these strategies into your weekly routine and stick with them until your dreams become a reality.

For those who want to finish the article, however, I’ll walk you through some vague pointers that’ll set you in the right direction if you don’t have the time to read the other article yet.

First, you’re going to turn your attention to the 1–2 constituents you highlighted in Step 3.3. Then, you’re going to turn your attention to the 1–2 strategies that you turned into process goals within those constituents which have the most leverage.

These process goals are going to be given the priority in your weekly routine. By priority, this means that you should spend at least double the amount of time acting on them per week as any other strategy you identified.

This will cause you to end up spending the bulk of your time spent moving towards your outcome goals on the most important process goals within the most important constituents.

The reason for this is simple: these processes and constituents are going to produce the best outcomes if you’re consistent with them. Getting really good at the few things that really matter is more conducive of success than being average at everything within a field. Simply put, you need to be cut-throat with your time if you’re really hungry for your outcome goals.

Final Thoughts: The Ultimate Guide on How to Set Goals and Secure Success

When I first learned how to set goals and implemented the framework this guide has covered, my growth skyrocketed.

For so long I was doing all the conventional things, which, unsurprisingly, delivered me conventional results. Unfortunately, because conventional results are non-existent, you can guess what I ended up achieving.

However, when I decided to take matters into my own hands and designed a unique, scientific system, I stopped setting goals that doomed me from the start, and I inevitably started seeing results.

This is why I designed this guide for you. Too many students fail to make any substantial progress and it sickens me. The root of this stagnation is not setting the right goals. Goals are rules — without them we have no direction in our lives and end up mindlessly drifting through our days. We become susceptible to modern distractions, like social media and video games, which channel our inner hunger for achievement and status.

If you act on this framework, then you will take a huge step towards a new future. Simply having a set of specific rules tailored to your deepest desires will shape the way you live and set you apart from your directionless peers.

Before I close out this article, one final note.

Goal setting is one piece of the puzzle. As mentioned in Step 3.7, you need to act on this framework you’ve implemented designed. You can have all the goals in the world, but if you’re not working towards them, then they’re not suddenly going to unfold.

Therefore, after you’ve milked this guide dry of value, I’d really recommend that you study The Ultimate Guide on How to Achieve Goals and Forge Habits. It will give you all the tools you need to make the process goals you’ve established today part of your weekly routine. Most importantly, it will teach you the science-based secrets behind staying consistent and turning the outcome goals you’ve set into reality.

Don’t leave your success to chance and give that guide a read. It’s one of the most important in the Strong Students library.

For this guide, however, that’s a wrap.

(Me: *ticks box for writing at least one weekly article and achieving one of my process goals*.)