Write the goal so a stranger could check it

Here is the test. Write your goal on a single line, hand it to someone who knows nothing about you or your work, and ask them to tell you, on a stated date, whether you achieved it. If they can answer without asking you a follow up question, the goal is written. If they cannot, what you have is a direction.

Directions are not useless. They are simply not checkable, and anything that is not checkable will drift for a year without anybody noticing, including you.

Why the first draft always fails

Goals arrive as moods. Get fitter. Be more strategic. Grow the business. Spend more time with the children. Every one of those is a real thing that a real person genuinely wants, and not one of them can be checked by a stranger, because each hides a judgement that only you can make and that you will make generously when the date arrives.

This is not a discipline problem. It is a drafting problem, and it is easy to fix once you stop treating the first version as the goal.

The three things a stranger needs

A checkable goal contains a measure, a date, and an unambiguous verb. Missing any one of them, the test fails.

1. The measure is a number, a state, or an artefact that exists or does not. A signed contract. Eleven thousand words. Forty five minutes without stopping. Two clients paying monthly.
2. The date is a specific day, not a season or a quarter. December is not a date. The eleventh of December is a date.
3. The verb has to be something you do rather than something you feel. Send, sign, publish, complete, register, run. Understand, explore, improve and focus on are all warning signs.

What that looks like in practice

Grow the business becomes: by the thirty first of March, three clients are paying a monthly retainer of at least two thousand dollars each. A stranger can check that on the first of April with a single question, and you will not be able to argue your way around the answer.

Be more strategic becomes: by the end of June, I have run a monthly two hour planning block for six consecutive months and each one has produced a written page. That one is worth noticing, because the original wanted a quality of mind and the rewrite settled for an observable behaviour. This is nearly always the right trade. Qualities of mind cannot be checked. Behaviours can, and the quality tends to follow the behaviour rather than the other way round.

The objection, and the answer to it

People push back on this, and the objection is a fair one. Reducing something meaningful to a number feels like it loses the point. What if the number is met and the thing you actually wanted did not happen?

Then you have learned something precise and expensive that would otherwise have taken years. You wrote down a proxy, you hit the proxy, and it turned out the proxy was wrong. That is a real finding. It is available only to people who wrote something checkable down in the first place, and it is why the rewriting is worth the half hour it costs.

The commoner outcome, by a wide margin, is that the goal was never the problem. Once it is written so that a stranger could check it, most people discover they know exactly what to do next and have known for some time.

Do this before your first session

The opening session of a one to one engagement puts your objective through this test, and the first two weeks of the group program do the same. Arriving with a draft that has already been through it saves you half an hour of paid time, and more usefully it means the first session can be about the obstacle rather than the wording.

Write the line. Read it as a stranger. Rewrite it. Most goals need three passes, and the third one is generally the honest one.