Naval Ravikant said in a recent podcast that he doesn’t set goals in the traditional sense of goal setting. He feels there is too much tension and pressure on you to achieve your goals and this can really have a negative impact on your happiness. What he does is drop a bad habit and replace it with a good habit. It made me think about goal setting and how I’ve approached it in recent years.

Last year I didn’t achieve 2 of my goals. It made me pause and rethink how I go about setting and achieving my goals.

I followed the SMART goal process and was really on a role last year. However I missed two goals late in the year and I was a little demoralized by the failure.

It was just timing but missing two goals late in the year really had an impact on me.

This year I’m trying something new. I’m going to try out John Lee Dumas’ The Freedom Journal. The premise is that you set and accomplish your goal in 100 days.

I’m going to tweak the 100 days and think of them as a 3 month goal. This will divide the year up into quarters and I can focus on 4 goals per year.

So there are two interesting things that came out of this concept for me:

1. You will always be clearly working towards one and only one goal. If your focus tends to wander than this might be just what you need.
2. Every 3 months you can work on a new goal. This will keep you motivated and should you decide to take things in a different direction your sunk costs are minimal.

I also think this systems allows you to think long term about your goals. John also mentions looking at your 1 year goals and your 3 year goals. I think this system is great in that you can break down larger goals into really actionable mini goals.

Check out John Lee Dumas’ The Freedom Journal. You can pre-order the book here.

Have you struggled with goal setting let me know about it on Twitter.  Did you sign up on th kickstart page? Let me know.