Backstory
This past year I’ve gone through a lot. My relationship of 6 years dissolved on the 4th of July which brought a whirlwind of uncertainty to the forefront. Since that time though, I have managed to improve myself in several aspects of my life that make me unrecognizable to the person I was less than half a year ago. Thankfully, I feel like whenever disaster strikes, I don’t make just a soft landing - I start flying higher. I’m going to try and conceptualize one of the aspects that I think helps keep me up in the air.
Two Types of Goals:
Discrete Goals
Think of your last 5 goals that you set for yourself. I would guess that a majority of them are discrete goals, which are goals that have a specific metric associated to them.
Want to lose weight? Goal: Lose 30 pounds
Want to be wealthy? Goal: Become a millionaire
These goals are “discrete” in the sense that they have a specific value tied to them. As you’ll see in a bit, these are bad goals to have by themselves. Something to ponder is how many of these types of goals have you set and then failed to achieve.
Continuous Goals
In understanding continuous goals, the video below is important to watch if you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the infinite game. I first learned about this through Simon Sinek, but the idea was created by Dr. James Carse in the 80’s.
Continuous goals are like an infinite game. These are goals that can be very broad and vague, but very importantly they point you in the right direction. For a couple of examples, you need only look above to the example discrete goals. The continuous goals are just to the left:
Want to lose weight? Goal: Lose 30 pounds [The continuous goal is to lose weight / get into shape]
Want to be wealthy? Goal: Become a millionaire [The continuous goal is to be wealthy]
Continuous goals are all around us, and they’re the ancestor to discrete goals.
Ultimately, continuous goals are what you should truly want, even if it’s vague. Then, you add in discrete goals that are in service of your continuous goal.
I hate to break it to you, but since continuous goals are like the infinite game, you never truly achieve victory. No one is in shape forever without putting in work consistently. No one is ever truly wealthy as there is more money to be gained. That’s ok though, because the continuous goals are stars in the sky to aim for, and you become a better human as a result of moving towards those goals.
How to Implement
Get to the Why
When designing new goals, you’ll want to get to a continuous goal first. At the start of the new year you may decide that you want to lose 25 pounds. Since this is discrete goal (a specific value is tied to it), you want to ask why until you get to the deeper meaning. In this example, you ask yourself: “Why do I want to lose 25 pounds” and the answer is “I want to look better in my clothes and feel more confident”. I think most of the time we know our why behind the goals, but we don’t think about the higher-order goal. Being tied to a specific outcome means that you’re more likely to fail and less likely to stay motivated if you don’t see progress or fail to meet that goal.
You Want To Be Trending
Once you’ve asked why enough times that you identify the continuous goal, you can identify the discrete goals that will work in service of the continuous goal. Continuing the previous example, if the continuous goal is to look better in clothes and feel more confident, a specific amount of weight as a discrete goal works just fine. It will certainly cause you to trend in the right direction of looking better in clothes and feeling more confident. The discrete goals also allow for you to maintain motivation since it’s something that you can achieve and do that within a reasonable timeframe.
Trending is important to understand because you will have days where you can’t live up to the goals you set for yourself. That is fine, because unless you do something drastic, one bad day isn’t going to ruin the rest of your life or set you back. As someone that is very hard on myself, I find asking myself “Am I trending in the right direction?” to let me be compassionate on days where I just don’t want to do the things.
Tim Ferriss has an amazing quote on this concept: “As long as you’re trending in the right direction, it doesn’t matter if you’re losing.”
Strong Discrete Goals, Loosely Held
This is a spin on the idea of having “Strong Opinions, Loosely Held”. When you set discrete goals, you should stick to them so you trend towards your continuous goal. Lets say though, that you lose enough weight that it’d actually harm your appearance and confidence to lose more. You should obviously stop that goal as it’s not trending you in the right direction. It’s important to let go of any discrete goals that aren’t helping you achieve the continuous goal. This can go as far as setting a discrete goal at the beginning and changing/removing it just a few days later once you realize a better way of achieving your goals. Stick to the discrete goals, work vigorously on them, but be willing to update them once they no longer serve you.
My Goals
Now that we understand all of the terminology and how to implement continuous goals, I want to share some of my own to help get you started.
Continuous Goal: I want to be in shape and comfortable and confident in my clothing
Discrete Goals:
Ride my stationary bike 3x a week for at least 25 minutes.
Have 1 meal a day
Do resistance training 3x a week
Like I mentioned in the previous section, you can ditch discrete goals at any time, or sometimes you outgrow them. For my goal of getting into shape, I don’t want to pigeonhole myself from being able to enjoy some times with friends so I’m fine having an extra meal in a day or forgoing exercise for that day to get some extra sleep. I’m also to the point where I’ve lost enough weight that I need to transition into eating more to be in maintenance / bulk so I’ll be updating this goal going into the new year.
Conclusion
I hope that this helps you going into the new year! This is my first long form post I’ve ever written, so I’m sure there are erroneous errors but that will get better with time (I may make a continuous goal to become a better writer 😉). You can find me at any platform @mrjustpeachy. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Be aware of your limited yet prolonged time on this planet, and try to improve the lives of the people around you. Much love.