Believe it or not, I didn’t always know how to set goals like a boss.
As a matter of fact, when I look back now, I can’t believe I left my career as a magazine designer without a clear idea on how to make this small business of mine work.
This throwing-caution-to-the-wind attitude was completely out of character for me.
I’m usually very methodical, which was probably why, after embarking on this journey, I spent the first six months researching business tactics like a maniac.
I made so many mistakes. I’m still making mistakes. (It’s part of life, and an even bigger part of business.)
Clearly I needed a system that would help me attain my goals, which at the time included lofty dreams such as “earn six figures yearly” and “reach 1 million page views per month on the blog.”
Bad goals vs. good goals
Then, one day, I came across a blog post by Melissa Cassera that changed my life.
She had just read a book about making attainable goals, and she learned something super important.
The gist: Often we make really bad goals.
Goals that go something like this: “earn six figures yearly” and “reach 1 million page views per month on the blog.”
Or, simply: “I want to lose 20 pounds.”
You may be wondering why these are bad goals.
They are bad because they are goals you cannot control.
Take the weight-loss goal, for starters.
No matter how many times you eat within your calorie range, no matter how many squats you do at the gym, at the end of the day there are still external forces in control of how much weight you might lose: Genes, the salt in your food, those jerks who put commercials on for ice cream right when you’re craving it, whether you get enough sleep and avoid stress.
If you only make goals you can control, eventually your hard work will pay off.
It’s more quantifiable to say, “I will run for 30 minutes three times this week” than to say “I want to lose 20 pounds.”
(For the record, I will not be running any time soon because I only run when chased. Still, it’s a good example, right?)
Making goals you can control
You can apply this approach of goal-setting to any area of your life.
For me, it looked like:
Bad goal: 1 million page views per month on the blog.
Good goal: Rework the SEO on my top 10 posts.
Bad goal: 100 sales per day in my print shop.
Good goal: Add 3 items per day to my print shop.
Because get this: I do not know how many sales I will have in my shop. That situation fluctuates like crazy. It ebbs and flows with the seasons.
I do not have control over your mouse, hovering ever so coyly over the “buy” button.
But I do know that I can work on creating designs (plus work on SEO, marketing and advertising) to get more mouse clicks in that shop to begin with!
Trust the process
After reading Melissa’s post all that time ago, I actually did set a goal to add 3 listings per day to my shops (that’s right, plural: you can check out my print shop, my Etsy shop, my Society6 shop).
It didn’t take long for the results to start showing up once I put the work in:
You can see in my Etsy shop alone I grew my sales exponentially in the past few years.
I went from 20 sales in 2016 to more than 600 in 2018. And this year is on track to be the best ever!
As Melissa wrote: “Trust that if you keep moving forward, you will eventually get what you want—or something close, or something better. Persistence always pays off, and sooner or later, good work always gets found.”
Tell me, what’s your bad goal? How can you twist it into a goal you can control to start getting results?
