Goal setting is broken, and Caroline Miller wants to fix it. The author of Getting Grit and Creating Your Best Life, Miller says the problem is that too much of goal setting is based on anecdote-based “magic,” as she calls it, when there is science to back up a more productive way to set, pursue and achieve relevant goals.
Her latest book, Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life, has been nominated for the Next Big Idea Club. It lays out her BRIDGE methodology—brainstorming, relationships, investments, decisions, grit and excellence—“to improve your pursuit of goal accomplishment and establish more effective pathways to success.”
Her goal for the book is nothing short of disrupting goal setting to helping readers “make their lives happier and feel more meaningful.”
She spoke with SUCCESS writer Matt Crossman about her book. This interview has been edited for length.
SUCCESS: You’ve read just about everything there is to read on this topic. You’ve written about it a good deal too. What was missing that Big Goals provides?
Caroline Miller: I’ve streamlined the science of goal setting by including Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory. Most people don’t know it, and it’s the most unknown but most replicated motivational and psychological theory that’s ever been created. It was voted No. 1 of 73 management theories.
I have not figured out why people don’t know it because everybody sets goals. There’s a lot of new research that needed to be added onto the back of goal setting to include the nuances that have to be considered when creating strategy. And that is pretty groundbreaking.
S: What is the biggest mistake people make when setting goals, and how does your book address that?
CM: The biggest mistake people make is thinking a goal is a goal is a goal, and they don’t understand the difference between a learning goal and a performance goal. And when you get that wrong, and you treat everything as an outcome you’ve got to shoot for, you will disengage quite often because you haven’t built in the ability to be curious, become engaged in the process of learning.
S: A question I’m guessing many readers can relate to: In the last several years, the market has been so volatile that I’ve struggled to set numerical goals that don’t seem like a waste of time. I’m not even sure how to set goals in this environment.
CM: That goes right to the heart of why I wrote the book. The world is spinning fast, and we’re not in the same environment we used to be. Everything is changing. You can’t expect to sell to the same clients the way you did at the outset of your career. Nobody can expect to sell a car the way they sold a car five years ago. Which means that you go back to the brainstorming (the B in the BRIDGE formulation), which is, “What’s new?”
Am I pegging my goals so that they reflect the reality of the industry I’m in? What is the meaning behind the work I’m doing? Is it to share information? Is it to learn? Is it to do all of the above? Is it to reach a certain segment?
I’m beginning to use artificial intelligence for a lot of these answers. Boy, does it prompt a different kind of thinking. Let’s say you’re in “perplexity.” You pose a question like, “Magazines are closing at the rate of 25% a year. If you were me, and this was what I’m most interested in writing about, where do you think I could take my talent so that I could have the impact I want to have?”
That’s where artificial intelligence truly has become a co-pilot for reinventing or pivoting in life. Once you have understood that, and you’re clear on the end goal and why it’s your goal, I think it’s so much easier to create a strategy that will work with learning and performance goals.
S: As we prepped for this, you told me in an email, “If New Year’s rolls around with the same old formulas like SMART goals, I call them zombie approaches, that won’t die, I’ll lose my mind.” Aside from the fact that cracked me up, it shows your passion. What is it about goal setting that gets you so fired up?
CM: Some of this is personal for me. My three adult children have all lost friends and acquaintances to suicide. And as I was researching my book Getting Grit, what I saw was this generation wasn’t taught how to be granular about how to get where they wanted to go.
They instead thought it would be easy. Because everything before this was like, “If you want it, you can have it,” and right before that was the law of attraction, “If you want it, you’ll attract it.”
I mean, this magical stuff is such BS, I can hardly stand it.
This is a world that requires that we work hard toward the things that matter most to us and that we actually persist in that process with the right strategies. And I believe that part of the anxiety and depression that’s been overwhelming the millennial generation, and now Gen Z, is because they have no idea how to have a dream they can accomplish. And so that’s part of the personal piece for me.
The other piece for me is I was introduced to the Locke and Latham goal-setting theory in 2005 in the very first master of applied positive psychology program at Penn. And I remember saying out loud to no one in particular, “There is a theory on goal setting that has real science?”
I raced home and I looked in Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Stephen Covey, and none of them had quotable research or footnotes in them. I want to bring a better approach to the world because the world deserves to have the right tool to accomplish goals.
For more on Caroline Miller and her views on goal setting and grit, check out her website. Her book Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life is available starting today. More on that here.
Photo by Friends Stock/Shutterstock.com
