How to set a Goal or Objective?

Sometimes you write your heart out, yet you didn’t find overwhelming response. On other time, you write a simple post about any topic and it becomes instant hit. It is really difficult to figure out what people’s will like and what not! My primary intention is to inspire peoples to do worthwhile things. Our life is full of choices. Right choice takes us forward and wrong choices, makes our life miserable. To move forward we need to make right choices, which we can only make when we have a goal in our life. Goals or objectives must be SMART. Here, SMART is acronym for

S= Specific

M=measurable

A=Attainable

R=Realistic

T=Time bound

Therefore, our goals should be aligning with above parameters. Suppose your goal statement is “I want to be rich”. With this goal you will not be able to achieve anything. This goal statement is neither time bound nor specific. Our goal statement must full fill all the above criteria to be SMART. SMART objective will be something like this: I want to be a millionaire within 2 years. If your goal is not time bound, you will never have urgency to attain. You will keep postponing it. If your goal is not measurable, then you will never know whether you attain your goal or not? If you make an unrealistic or unattainable goal, then you will just waste time and money. For example, if your goal is to create a Robot smarter than humans in 2 days. Since time period is too less compared to the amount the work, it is an unrealistic goal which you set without any proper investigation.

There are a lot of students too reading this blog; it will not be fair to end this post without considering one example of goal setting for them. However, before setting goals, you must evaluate your strength and weakness and your resources. For example, there is a student who gain 45% marks this year and he makes below goal statement for him:

“I want to be the topper in class.”

This is not a goal, this can be termed as wishful thinking. This goal is neither “Specific” not “Realistic”. Though, nothing is impossible but there are practical limits of improvement. There are only 24 hours in a day. You cannot change this fact. Therefore, more realistic and specific goal will be:

I want to achieve 75% marks in each subject in next exams.

Now, this is a SMART objective which you can achieve through hard work and dedication.

After setting a goal, next most important thing is how to achieve it? If you have a big goal, like one year or ten-year goal, first break it into small goals. To achieve 75% marks in final exam, you have to do well in each semester and class test. Therefore, set monthly targets for achieving your goals. Keep higher targets for the beginning as you cannot change your past later on and future is unpredictable. Initial advantage will help you achieve your goal even if in future you might face some problem.   

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