On achieving success, discussions often revolve around goal setting, organization, and productivity. However, in a sea of repetitive advice, it’s time to delve into unconventional approaches that add depth and effectiveness to your journeys. This article offers fresh perspectives on goal-setting that transcends conventional methods.

And no, I won’t be the 500^th person to suggest ‘SMART goals’ to you. The traditional SMART goals may not be the smartest approach, ironically. While effective in the short-run, SMART goals have many limitations in fitting all sizes and meanings. This article addresses these limitations.

Goal Orientation Theory

Drawing inspiration from the goal orientation theory, we unveil a more holistic view of goal setting. Goal orientation theory is a psychological framework explaining individuals’ approaches, motivations, strategies, and responses to goals under different contexts (education, work, personal development). The theory divides goal orientations into two.

1. Performance goal orientation: This aligns with outcome-based goals, focusing on achieving specific outcomes, like the SMART goal system.
2. Learning goal orientation: A process-based approach prioritizing continuous growth and skill development. These goals extend beyond immediate results, diverging from the confines of SMART goals.  

The theory outlines the pros and cons of each system and their relevant applicability. This post dives into the process-based goal system, a relatively unconventional approach that has felt more meaningful, sustainable, and stress-free.

Navigating Process-Based Goals

Process-based goals revolve around shaping actions, behaviours, and patterns to solidify personal growth. Rather than fixating on outcomes, these goals nurture effective strategies and practices, championing lifelong learning and development. The journey becomes more important than the destination, elevating long-term visions over fleeting goals.

Challenges with Outcome-Based Goals

Outcome-based goals can provide direction and motivation to achieve a specific, attainable, and timed goal, with a rewarding completion experience.

However, the insight is short-term, the joy is short-lived, and the reward-chasing may lead to meaningless hustling, driven by societal pressures.

Furthermore, fixating on measurements, time, and outcomes can undermine the importance of the process. This can devalue an individual’s progress and learning achievements.

A New Perspective on Goal Setting: Process-Based Goals

Illustrating with a personal example, the goal of recording 2000 blog views per month might overlook qualitative considerations. Process-based goals offer an alternative path, allowing content quality and meaningful engagement to take precedence over clicks.

Alternatively, I feel more content by creating goals that remove the pressure of posting in high quantities at the expense of quality or prioritizing trendy topics over meaningful ones. The process-based goal-setting system allows for a deeper connection with values and meaningful outcomes.

Core process-based goals

Overall, my core process-based goals that drive my actions and aspirations connect with defining my values, ethics, and a wider mission; attempting to become a jack of all trades; expanding my comfort zone; capacity building; and maintaining my mental health by establishing healthy thought processes.

Connecting Goal Setting with Values and a Wider Mission

Setting outcome-based goals can be superficial. I have felt that way about setting career paths or taking actions that are money minded. As someone not interested in, yet aware of the financial possibilities in, business, law, or engineering, I could not get myself to venture into those fields despite the uncertainties I faced opting for a political science route.

Identifying values and a mission helps identify opportunities, filter decisions, narrow career paths, and feel naturally motivated to serve your ethical and value-based commitments.

Becoming a Jack of All Trades

Aspiring to become a jack of all trades has helped me before I knew what I wanted to study as well as now. In high school, this goal allowed me to keep my options open and develop a versatile portfolio to serve many roles and expand my network.

Now, developing interdisciplinary and skill-wide competencies is helpful because they help better connections across global phenomena. Versatility in skills is also beneficial to volunteer for causes and projects you may be passionate about, if not for employment.

Expanding Comfort Zone  

Expanding comfort zones, though challenging, is essential, especially when you venture into new fields and skills. In times like that, the following quote keeps me going (if you’ve heard me at a talk before, you better know what’s coming up ahead…):

“You are a king, and your comfort zone is your empire. Your goal is to keep expanding that empire. You do that by leaving your comfort zone, and when you get used to it, that becomes your new comfort zone. You keep repeating that process again and again.”

We’re often told to “get out of your comfort zone” or have challenging moments shot with “life gets harder!” Expanding one’s comfort zone is also hard. Rather than plain advice, it helps to reframe them into scenarios like the conquering king or deeper insights like capacity building.

Capacity Building

You can only grow so many plants in a garden… unless you expand the garden. Unfortunately, unlike expanding a garden, capacity building can’t be done with cash on the table. So, this process is a lot slower, and you should honour your limitations, respect your pace, and be proud of the improvements.

There are many ways to build capacity, but my most recommended one is to take courses, attend talks and workshops, and engage with other people and content productively. Practice makes perfect… but not without a strategy.

I could not improve at the most mechanistic of tasks because of strategy—typing. I used to type at the speed of 90 words per minute (WPM). I soon learned the ten-finger method. My typing speed shot up to 130 WPM, which would have been impossible without the ten-finger method that took a course, not just practice, to learn.

I improved in many fields where I felt the advice was cliché by relearning better-planned strategies, even for something as basic as studying. I highly recommend my other posts, ‘Beating the Illusion of Competence in Learning and Learning Efficiently’ and ‘Pointers You Need to Start Following When Preparing for and Taking a Test,’ that draw on systematic theory and practice, not cliché advice.

Thought Process Goals and Maintaining Mental Health

Developing reasonable thought processes that allow me to be more compassionate and realistic with myself helped maintain sanity, have free time, and develop efficiently. These have been crucial to all other goals’ efficiency. Some core thought processes have been:

1. Prioritizing process-based goals over outcome-based goals. It helps honour progress better than fixating on outcomes.
2. Interpreting failures as temporary setbacks. Not achieving something does not make you a failure. It gets difficult when rejections pile up, as they did in my recent internship hunt, but getting over this realistically and compassionately quickly has been an important goal.
3. Being okay with not having all the answers. Feeling unplanned or not knowing things about your trajectories and outcomes can be frustrating. But being anxious and stressed over being human—not knowing what you can’t know at the time—only makes it harder.
4. Live with my thoughts. In a world where many stimuli are easily accessible, it’s become more important to sit with your thoughts instead of tuning them out with loud music. Free-flowing and random thoughts and reflections are indispensable to better understanding yourself, the world, and much more.

In Conclusion: Achieving Beyond Conventions

Balancing process-based and outcome-based goals is the key. Process-based goals infuse motivation, ethics, and determination, giving you the drive and ease to create and accomplish meaningful outcome-based pursuits.

Traditional goal-setting approaches offer valuable insights, but they’re not the sole solution. Embrace a mix of process-based and outcome-based goals. This shift empowers you to navigate the complexities of values and success, prioritize long-term considerations like personal growth, learning, and self-compassion, and experience a more enriching journey.

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