Some time ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine at Apple who works on the iOS team. After we had been chatting for about twenty minutes, he asked me, "Do you want to know why we kill it at Apple?" My heart leaped. I knew he had been a part of more than one insanely successful project during his tenure in Cupertino. My mind to raced in anticipation as I guessed what gem he might share. "It's because we take the time to get clear on what we are going to accomplish." Hmm, I thought. Really, you get clear? Of course, you get clear! Apple always produces clear and clean products. "How is that different from other tech companies?" I asked. "You don't understand," he said. "We take the time to hammer out what we are trying to accomplish before we start and then every single day thereafter. We never stop clarifying and communicating the vision we are trying to create. Every team member has to understand exactly what we are doing so they can figure out how they will contribute at their highest-level performance."
We can all take a page from Apple's playbook when we approach life design. Just like designing a product, in life design we need three things to create and execute long-term goals successfully. First, a clear vision of what we want to accomplish. Second, a plan to accomplish our vision. And third, a clear set of values that guide our actions in our journey. The challenge is that all of these things happen simultaneously. They have to be discovered, rediscovered, and adjusted on the go.
Here are three things that I have found helpful in creating and managing my long term goals -- which are always works-in-progress and never a tidy list.
Escape to explore more options. Figuring out what we want to accomplish is a process, not an event, and we need space to do the figuring out. The CTO of a large software company recently told me that he gets a hotel room across the street from his office one night every month. He uses this distraction-free zone to explore his options, to determine what he is going to go big on and what he is going to eliminate. While you might not need to get a hotel room every month to design and redesign your goals, you will need a safe space that you can count on to do absolutely nothing but consider your life design and what adjustments you need to make.
Start with a question. If you ask the right questions, you will get the right answers. Good questions help us get to a deeper level of thinking. Getting a concrete answer to the right question creates directional clarity. You should be able to create a clear Essential Intent--See Essentialism-Chapter 10--that includes the following components.:
- Verb: What you will do
- Noun:Who you are doing it for
- Date: When you're finished
- Outcome: What is the measurable result
The key is iteration. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will your long-term goals--three to five years. I recommend three types of escapes designed to help you transform your design sessions from isolated events into a cohesive process of strategic iteration.
- Personal Offsite. This is a one-day event held quarterly or monthly. In this space, you wrestle with the bigger questions, like "what's the most important thing for me to achieve in my family for the next three years?" Because most of us don't know the answers to these questions--and they change as we change--exploring them repeatedly keeps them relevant. More on how to hold a personal offsite here.
The world's greatest designers create space to think and take solitude to explore. When I was doing my undergraduate work, my favorite teacher would say, "There is no such thing as good writing, only good editing." It's not about goal creation; it's about goal iteration.
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