Sailing through life – how you can navigate with super goals

From a young age, I’ve been obsessed with setting goals. I set OKRs each year to make sure I was working effectively towards the life I wanted. There were annual goals broken down into quarterly targets, monthly habits, and weekly actions. Every significant commitment had to be aligned with my goals. The goals were SMART, I was disciplined, and my dreams came true.

Mastering Chinese

I wanted to learn Chinese and move to China, which I did. However, the problem with languages is that it takes many years to reach native level fluency. Especially Chinese. As a beginner, I found other people were encouraging and impressed by my efforts. Once I reached fluency, it became increasingly difficult to carry on. The marginal benefits of studying diminished as I spent endless hours memorising low frequency vocabulary and fine tuning grammar points. Encouragement was replaced with confusion and criticism. I realised my self discipline was not going to carry me for more than a few months. I had no motivation to continue. I needed something else to help me go the distance.

Doubling my salary

As a graduate, I set a target to 2x my salary by age 30. At the time, this was just another way to represent a healthy 9% CAGR over 8 years, but it was exceptional in that it was the only goal I set that spanned several years. We don’t know what the future holds, so why waste time charting a course only for it to change and result in disappointment? It is futile. What works is good detailed plan of gradual incremental improvements and discipline to hold the course while ignoring silly distractions like emotions. At age 30, I hit 2x, and a year later, I reached 2.5x.

Wait, that worked?

Sometimes success is a great teacher too. I realised I’d been completely blind to an essential part of setting goals. The SMART goals which had so effectively turned my dreams into reality were also constraining me to uninspiring short term thinking. I recently went to the Toyota Museum near Nagoya which I highly recommend. I was inspired. Sakichi Toyoda founded Toyota Industries making industrial looms and then his son Kiichiro created Toyota Motor Corporations, now the largest automobile manufacturer in the world. That was not a SMART goal. Young Sakichi did not plan for his unborn son to produce 10 million uninvented cars for a non-existent global market in 2 generations time. Yet it happened anyway.

The missing link – super goals

Super goals serve another essential purpose. Ultimately our consumable resources are time, money, and most limiting of all, energy. Super goals are our sails. The exact details and direction of the wind don’t matter, we just need raw energy to power our goals. Sometimes we need a small and sturdy storm jib, other times we can soar behind a spinnaker. The wind will not guide us to the destination, we must still be skilled navigators to find and harness the currents to our advantage without getting blown off course. Regardless of when or even if we’ll arrive at our destination, it is impossible without harnessing the wind.

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” ― Bill Gates

There are good reasons to dream big. Logically, growth is exponential so it is hard to imagine what can be achieved in 10 or 20 years. Any significant endeavor will take at least 5 years. Obtaining a degree, starting a career, building a business, raising children. Why risk disappointment? It turns out sustained happiness comes from having and making progress towards a goal. There’s a burst of happiness upon finishing, but it is short lived and soon followed by a depressing return to reality and the existential dread of having nothing to do. You know that feeling.

Super goals serve as both a long term roadmap and power the journey. It is more than a vision of the future, it is a master plan spanning years or decades into the future that you fully intend to achieve with component SMART goals and regular milestones to celebrate. There is still fuel in the tank for those periods without wind, but not enough to power the entire journey. The winds will change over the years and from one place to the next, so these super goals should be reviewed and refined annually. A sufficiently grand super goal can even inspire others through visionary leadership.

How to super goal with worked example

On the flight to Japan, I was browsing through the in flight entertainment in search of something fun and adventurous to set the scene for my holiday. Instead, I settled on “Dear Family”. It tells the true story of a family, focusing on the father Nobumasa Tsuboi, an engineer. Nine year old Yoshimi, one of the daughters, was diagnosed with a congenital heart disease and given 10 years to live with no hope of a cure. The family refused to give up, learning about the disease, seeking treatment abroad to no avail, and eventually deciding to tackle the problem themselves despite no prior experience in developing medical products. Not to mention that the cure was a permanent artificial heart implant. Much begging and bowing ensued as Tsuboi sought guidance from professors and researchers. For 10 years, day and night he developed prototypes using his plastics engineering expertise, pivoting his small family business from manufacturing to medical products, ending up deep in debt. 10 years later, he saved his daughter with his invention.

Of course not, they weren’t even close. A permanent artificial heart still has not been achieved to this day, over 40 years later. There would be no miracle for Yoshimi. They would never achieve their goal of saving her. In deep despair, Tsuboi drops to his knees at the side of her hospital bed, takes her hand and bows his head to it as he tells Yoshimi that an artificial heart was out of reach and he has failed her as a father.

Yet their journey was incredible and their lives were rich with purpose and love. Instead of accepting defeat and doing nothing, the family chose to pull together and dedicate a decade of their lives to their daughter and sister. Yes there was heavy stress and long hours in the lab, but they also took time to show Yoshimi the world and share special experiences. It is difficult to think of a more fulfilling way to spend those years.

In response, the teenage Yoshimi sets them a new goal. Having spent much of her childhood in hospital with heart issues, she had watched other girls come and go, sometimes never to return. She asks her father to save the other little girls instead of her. After years of development, they had made remarkable progress in the field and also developed a deep understanding of medical device technology. They pivot to intra-aortic balloon pumps (IABP), a promising novel device already in use but causing many complications which nobody was investigating. Tsuboi uses his materials and manufacturing expertise to optimise the device, and a few years later, his improved version was successfully in use in hospitals. In the final years of her life Yoshimi sees the device save life after life, knowing that she had played a central role.

Sustainable energy

I definitely was not crying on the plane. Surprisingly, I was ready for my holiday and looking forward to inspiration and excitement. Many years ago, I was driven by naive optimism, youthful energy, and newbie gains. Other times I ran on corrosive anger and anxiety. With age and experience, those winds are long gone and I have been wandering the doldrums while running on fumes in search of an alternative. Something intrinsic, clean, and sustainable. Who knew I would find it on a flight? Splashing out on a comfy JAL ticket turned out to be a great decision. Finally I can feel the wind picking up again.