A few years ago, I discovered one of my old diaries from the 90s. I leafed through and even back then, I'd set myself a goal.

One of my goals was to own a Porsche by the time I was 30

There is was, written down in black and white.

A friend of mine asked me what my goals were and I told him.

"Are they written down?"

"No"

"They aren't going to happen then."

And he quoted some study from a fancy university that proved that your goals need to be written down if they're going to have a chance of succeeding.

"That's where I've been going wrong." I thought

At the time, I thought that was it. The answer to my prayers. All I had to do was write it down and magically somehow the universe would align and I'd get a nice Porsche with no effort.

Turns out it doesn't work that way.

Shocker eh?

Many years later, when I started doing the parkrun, I set myself a goal to run it in under 30 minutes

So guess what I did?

Yep.

I wrote it down and waited for it to happen.

To be fair, at least I was doing some running this time and making an effort.

But my efforts weren't targeted.

I had no strategy and no steps.

Another was to have a piece of my writing published. This was back in the pre-internet days of having to send work to magazines or newspapers.

I didn't get far. I sent off the occasional story or article, got bored, and gave up.

But the thing is, they're all acceptable goals aren't they?

I'd imagine they are similar to the ones that countless people around the world have set themselves.

They're nice and precise. The first one even had a timescale.

By the time I'm 30.

Spoiler alert.

I never did get the Porsche

I never managed a sub 30-minute 5k either.

So, what went wrong?

Look at the goals and there's no substance. They are just words on a page.

I may as well have written;

• I want to run the 5k in 18 minutes
• Or I want to earn £1 million from Medium.

Because they're just words on a page.

None of them looked at HOW I was going to do it.

None of them addressed the steps I needed to take.

It's good to have an end result in sight but really, before you get there, you need to focus on output and the fact that it's going to take several steps and plenty of hard work.

The problem with just writing down the end goal is that there's no way of calculating how far toward the goal you are.

There's nothing wrong with a goal-driven target but it needs to be broken down so that the steps are clearly defined.

The end goal should almost be incidental to the process.

Never lose sight of the fact that while the end goal is attractive, that's what it is, the end.

And like any journey, before you get to the end, there are plenty of steps you need to take.

So, write your goals down, by all means, and set big ambitious goals too, but don't lose sight of the fact that in order to get there, you'll need to take lots of smaller steps and it could well take a while.

For the record, my current writing goal is to make $100 a month from writing on here.

Uh oh. I hear you say, he's done it again.

My process goal is;

To write at least 200 words of an article a day.

Every day.

Regardless of results, views, claps, or follows.

Those things are all incidental but will all go some way to helping me achieve my real goal of making money here.