How to Achieve Your Goals: The Top Eight Things You Need to Know

Conventional wisdom says that if you want something, you just need to put your head down and keep pushing until you get it.

However, if you’ve been following my seven-part series on goal-setting and -achievement, you know that effort only accounts for a small portion of the complex dynamics of human motivation and goal achievement.

These articles are by no means the last word on the matter, and going forward, I’ll continue to develop the topic for you from time to time.

But here, I’ve collected the fundamental concepts you need to keep in mind if you want to be effective in accomplishing your goals . . . and it so happens that putting them into practice can yield far more than just objective achievements.

1. First things first. 

Your goals are either attractive or aversive, meaning you’re either trying to be closer to or further away from a certain state. In each case, there is your current state and the one to which you’re comparing it.

Similar to the way an air conditioner depends on a thermostat, you’re always comparing those two values—whether you’re doing it consciously or not—and gauging your pace of progress.

These factors comprise a feedback loop that affects both your motivation to take action and the way you feel.

2. Keep your eyes open. 

The need for feedback means that being willing to assess your progress, even if it’s not as impressive as you’d like, is imperative. (There are exceptions, though. Keep reading.)

Without feedback, you have no idea whether what you’re doing is working, let alone knowing what you need to do differently to achieve better results.

Practicing mindfulness meditation can help you develop the capacity to collect this valuable feedback, because (among other things) it works to loosen the aversion you have to unpleasant experience, like bad news.

3. Pair up your feedback loops.

Just having an aversive goal isn’t very efficient or stable, because there are lots of ways not to be a certain way. When you pair an aversive goal with a complementary attractive one, you link a repulsive force to a propulsive one, improving both your pace of progress and your aim.

4. Don’t take your goals at face value.

Take a look beneath any superficial goals you may have.

If you have the goal of being rich, could it be that wealth is, at least in part, just the observable outcome of the sense of competence that you really desire?

By identifying the values that underlie your attractions and aversions, you’ll become more intrinsically motivated, which will make you happier and better able to withstand setbacks or slow progress.

5. Do some experiments.

Once you have an educated guess about the values that inform your goals, try setting some smaller, more concrete goals that correspond to them, and pay attention to how you feel as you achieve them.

If you feel better, you’re on the right track, and if you don’t, then don’t worry—it was just an experiment. Try something else.

Going forward, it’s a good idea to remain attentive to your emotional reactions to any kind of successes or failures you experience—even accidental or unrelated ones—because they can clue you in to things you may not have known are important to you.

6. Bite size goals are important, too.

If you’ve identified lofty, intrinsically satisfying goals, that’s great! They’ll help keep you oriented and motivated forever. But you’ll also need some intermediate-term goals.

That’s because your sense of forward momentum toward your goals is crucial to your day-to-day happiness—more crucial than your distance from your goals, actually!

Just make sure these mid-term goals are aligned with your long-term ones.

7. Simplify your strivings.

Once you have intermediate goals that are aligned with your big-picture ones, try just paying attention to the intermediate ones.

For instance, if you think that abstaining from a piece of cake will help you be thinner, which will help you attract a mate, which will allow you to have a family, which will result in a happy and fulfilled life, then you’re imagining a long chain reaction in which any number of things can go wrong and make you feel bad.

Instead, why not put the odds in your favor? Just abstain from the cake to be healthier and leave it at that.

8. You go where you look.

Motorcyclists know that if you round a corner and find a rock in your way, fixating on the rock is a great way to hit it. It’s better to look at the path around the rock.

In the same way, focusing on what you don’t want to do can have the opposite effect.

When you’re pursuing goals like that, your brain is on the lookout for mistakes, and in your brain, the negative impact from a mistake is bigger than the positive impact from a success.

Instead, try to find a way to reward yourself for abstinence instead of punishing yourself for indulgence.

Achievement and authenticity enhancing each other

So, achieving your goals will indeed require effort to do something that doesn’t come as easily as what you’re currently doing. Otherwise, you’d already be doing it.

But by applying some of these principles, you can transform your path to your goals from a dreary death march to a journey that’s inherently fulfilling each step of the way.

The bonus is that when you’re enjoying your mission, you might find that the effort you’re making feels a bit more effortless, too.