STOP Moving the Goal Posts on Your Goals

Buggio and all you beautiful people, I am still here in beautiful Largo de Garda, Italy, and having a good old time. We’re gonna be heading down to Forenza tomorrow. This is our last day up here at the lake. It’s absolutely gorgeous, though. So last week, I want to share with this story and see if this resonates with you. See if you’ve ever experienced anything similar to this. Last week, we did our beyond the apex accelerated coaching call. We do this once a week with.

These are pretty high level entrepreneurs, all doing between six and seven figures and looking to scale to eight figures and beyond. So some real badasses in this group. And it’s funny how despite being badasses and despite being at a place where a lot of people would look at them and say, you have made it, you are a successful entrepreneur. You must have all the answers. How still, even at that level, we struggle to solve the same basic problems over and over and over at the different levels of entrepreneurship. My experience has been, there are really no new problems, per se. You’re going to get a taste of every type of problem that comes up when you’re still small. You’re doing your first four figures, doing your first five figures.

All the problems are just magnified. There’s the same seven to eight problems that are just magnified and played out on a larger scale, but generally, it’s gonna be the same problems. And one of the students had a question around hiring, and he had just celebrated 100k week. 100k week. So they did $100,000 in a week, which is a new high for them. Kudos. Crushing. Absolutely wonderful.

And he’s like, when do I hire my first sales guy? Because he had been doing all the sales himself, so that’s even more impressive, right? And I was like, dude, I think you’re technically there already. I think you’re there. And he goes, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know. I don’t know. Because of x, y, and z. This reason, that reason, the other reason, all these things, right? It’s the age old question of, like, when do you know you’re ready to hire? And truthfully, there’s only two times to hire.

You either hire too soon or you hire too late. When you hire too soon, it costs you capital. When you hire too late, it costs you opportunity. Opportunity. Now, usually, because we can track capital on a spreadsheet, much easier that we can track opportunity, we typically default to paying the cost of opportunity and not hiring, waiting until it’s waiting too long. Now, in this context with this student, I asked him, like, how do you know when you are ready to hire? What are the metrics that you need to hit for you to be able to objectively look down and say, yes, I’ve hit these numbers. Now it is time to make this decision, because so often when we make decisions, we make decisions with emotion, that then we justify with logic that we connect the dots. But in reality, the dots don’t necessarily connect and get run over.
Dots don’t necessarily connect with emotions. So we need to avoid making emotional decisions. So how can we make that process as objective as possible? And the way that you do this is by keeping a decision journal, you, very simple process to just get a journal, get a piece of paper. What I want you to do is write out, how is it that you are feeling in this moment emotionally? Like, are you feeling energized? Are you feeling tired? Are you feeling dubious, skeptical? What is the emotion that you’re feeling? Because first, we want to mark our emotional state, because by marking it and by drawing awareness to it, we are less prone to make an emotional decision in that direction. So if you recognize I am feeling anxious right now, that that’s going to help your logical side of the brain counteract that. Second is I want you to write down what is the decision that you’re trying to make? What is the problem you’re actually trying to solve for? Get really clear here, because a problem well defined is half solved. And so often, and my experience working with entrepreneurs is that most people do not have clearly defined problems that they’re trying to solve. They’re just out there willy nilly trying to solve hypothetical problems that don’t necessarily move the needle.
Use a theory of constraint here to determine what is the actual problem that we would like to solve for. Alright, next you’re going to list out three decisions that you’re considering that will lead you to your desired end state. Now, it’s important to have three here, because life is never a, is it this or is it a that? And the more that we can get out of that kind of black and white thinking of this versus that, the more we can go, it’s this, this or this, the, the more likely we will not cling desperately to one answer. We don’t get attached to it. So we write out the three questions next, or, I’m sorry, the three decisions that we’re considering. Isn’t that beautiful? Look at that camera. There we go. Pretty lovely.
So we’re gonna write out the three, three things that we’re considering. Next, I want you to write out what you think the probabilities are of each of those problems leading you to your desired out state. Like write down what do you think is going to happen if you were to go with this solution versus that solution, and then write out what you think the probability, and get specific. Put the actual number here. Right. Next is write out why you think the decision you’re making right now is the right decision. Now, here’s why this is also important, is in six months from now, you can come back to this document, you can review it, you can assess the quality of your decision making, and you can say, was I thinking correctly about this problem? Did I go with a solution? Did it play out the way I thought it would? Did one of these other solutions? Would that have been better now that I had the gift of hindsight and more data? Now, in the case of this gentleman who’s struggling to hire, what’s interesting is that he had already done something like this, right? He’d already written out the objectives by which he would measure this decision and whether or not he’d be ready. And the thing is, he told me, well, I said I wanted to have x number of dollars in the bank before I was ready to make that next hire.

We’re only a couple thousand away, so we’re pretty much there. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. So you remember at the beginning when I, when I said, I think you’re pretty much there, and you said, no, no, no, you gave me x, y, z reasons. Now I’m asking you, what were the objective reasons that you were going to use to measure? You gave me the exact reasons that you were going to determine, and it turns out we’re exactly there. So now what are you doing? We’re moving the goalposts on ourselves, aren’t we? Now we can look at it and say, well, was my projection wrong? Did I forecast incorrectly? Did I think I needed x number of dollars and I actually needed y? That’s different than just saying, oh, I don’t feel ready. Right. So this is a classic case where you get to your goal and suddenly you’re moving the goal post on yourself and the way that you avoid this by keeping that decision journal. So you understand, what was your, what was your mind doing at the time that you made the original decision? And now we can correctly assess whether we are making an emotional decision to push the goalpost back or whether we are actually making a better informed decision now to recast our forecast.

So take this idea of the decision journal and of avoiding moving goalposts for any reason other than a logical outcome. Take these to heart. See how you can apply them to your own business. It will serve you well. So that’s going to do it for me. I will see you guys in the next episode. But until then, ciao, Bella.