Winning Big and Winning Small
There are two main philosophies of goal setting: one says you should set big goals, the other says you should set small goals. Which one is correct?
In fact, both are important, and you should combine both philosophies to win both big and small. Here we will show you how and why.
1. Philosophies of Setting Goals
There are two main philosophies of goal setting: setting big goals and setting small goals.
1.1. Philosophy of big goals
The philosophy of big goals recommends setting big, long-term goals that inspire. Some people call them BHAGs, which stands for Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. BHAGs are long-term goals that ensure people can come together around a common vision. Examples of such BHAGs include sending a man to the moon, winning the war against cancer, curing HIV, and eliminating hunger.
People known for having set inspiring long-term goals include Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. When Apple released the iPhone, Steve Jobs did not just want to create a phone with new features but wanted to revolutionize the way we communicate.
When the first Tesla car came out, Elon Musk did not just want to create a better car but to make transportation green and thereby help save the planet. Similarly, with his company SpaceX, he not only wants to upgrade rockets but also to allow regular citizens to travel to space.
All of the above are big vision goals that can inspire a whole company or even a whole nation.
1.2. Philosophy of small goals
The philosophy of small goals recommends setting small, actionable goals that can be accomplished with one simple action. By accomplishing many small goals in a row, you will eventually be able to accomplish your big goals.
An example of this philosophy was given by Laird Hamilton, who once held the record for surfing the highest waves of over 65 ft (20 meters). When asked how this was possible, he replied that he never aimed at surfing such big waves. He started as a child wanting to surf a 5 ft wave, then a 6 ft wave, and so on. When he had already been surfing a 60 ft wave, it did not seem scary at all to surf a 65 ft wave.
This illustrates that small goals can indicate the next step and thereby finally lead us to the ultimate big goal.
2. Why Should You Follow a Small Goal Philosophy?
If you’ve ever wanted to accomplish a big vision goal, you know that getting started can be a bit of a challenge. This is due to the fact that you might only have some vague idea of how to get started with the first step. Even if you know exactly what you want, you do not know how to achieve it.
Or perhaps you sit down to think about everything you have to do to achieve the big vision goal and get completely intimidated, freezing up and feeling incapable of taking the first step.
These are typical problems of focusing on the big vision goals. But as soon as you break the big vision goal into projects, projects into tasks and tasks in small actionable subtasks everything becomes easier. These small goals do not seem intimidating anymore and you can easily identify what to work on next.
Desmond Tutu once wisely said that “there is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” What he meant by this is that everything in life that seems daunting, overwhelming, and even impossible can be accomplished gradually by taking on just a little at a time.
The strategy of breaking down big goals into small goals is also what the most successful video games do. In these games there is a big prize to be captured at the end, but in order to achieve this you have to have a high level of mastery. If the game would make you compete for the big prize right away you would give up quickly as you do not have enough mastery yet. So good games start out with small prizes to be achieved by a low level mastery and continuously increase the mastery required as you increase your skills. This keeps you and other players engaged from start till the end. Those are the reasons that small goals are beneficial and even necessary.
If you’ve ever wanted to accomplish a big vision goal, you know that getting started can be a challenge. This is often due to having only a vague idea of how to start. Even if you know exactly what you want, figuring out how to achieve it can be daunting.
Or perhaps the thought of everything you have to do to achieve the big vision goal feels overwhelming, causing you to freeze up and feel incapable of taking the first step.
These are typical problems of focusing on big vision goals. But as soon as you break the big vision goal into projects, projects into tasks, and tasks into small actionable subtasks, everything becomes easier. These small goals no longer seem intimidating, and you can easily identify what to work on next.
Desmond Tutu once wisely said, "There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time." This means that everything in life that seems daunting, overwhelming, and even impossible can be accomplished gradually by taking on just a little at a time.
The strategy of breaking down big goals into small goals is also what the most successful video games do. These games have a big prize at the end, but to achieve this, players must attain a high level of mastery. Starting with small prizes that require low-level mastery and gradually increasing the mastery required as skills improve keeps players engaged from start to end. This illustrates the benefits of small goals, showing they are beneficial and even necessary.
We can illustrate the benefits of small goal setting as follows:
3. Why Should You Follow a Big Goal Philosophy?
The problem with small goals is that they can lack the power of big goals in bringing people together around a vision and motivating them to do their best work. Also, big goals make people happy by just thinking about the future where the big goal has been achieved. If you work only on small goals every day, even though you are accomplishing many of these goals, it can still be a frustrating experience. This is because you do not see why you are doing all of this; you are just getting tasks done instead of accomplishing something major.
Imagine an engineer of the Project Apollo, which was the NASA spaceflight program to bring a man to the moon. If this engineer did not know the final purpose of the project, they might become exhausted and demotivated. Knowing the big purpose, such as winning in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, can provide significant motivation.
Similarly, imagine the difference between the motivation of an engineer at Tesla who:
- Gets told that they have to reduce the weight of the lithium battery by 100 grams (specific objective).
- Gets told that they are working on a critical project to save the planet by having greener transportation (bigger vision).
Which of the two is more motivational? Clearly the bigger vision of saving the planet.
This kind of big motivation and unity of people around a vision can only be achieved by big goals.
We can illustrate the benefits of big goal setting as follows:
Thus, we see that big goals are very important. At the same time we have seen that small goals are also important.
So both small and big goals are important and we need to have both simultaneously.
4. How To Set Big and Small Goals?
To set big and small goals you need to ask two questions: Why and How?
Asking "why" brings you from small goals to big goals, a bottom-up approach. Asking "how" brings you from big goals to small goals, a top-down approach. For effective goal setting, you need both approaches.
I would recommend doing the following steps:
- Brainstorming: Write down your small goals, those goals that are actionable and that you need to work on over the next month.
- Bottom-up approach: Going from these actionable goals ask yourself what are the larger projects that you want to accomplish by getting these tasks done. And why do you want to accomplish these projects?
- Set big level goals: From the above exercise you will already have identified some of your big levels goals. Then ask yourself what other big goals do you have? In particular go over each of your life areas and identify your top level goals:
- Friends & family
- Finances
- Personal development
- Spirituality
- Health & Fitness
- Career & Business
- Top-down approach: Once you have identified all top level goals, try to see what projects and actions are required to get these goals accomplished by asking the question HOW. Then write these tasks and subtasks down.
Following the above steps you will create a goal pyramid. You can read more about this here:
 | How to Set Goals The Right Way Using Goal Pyramids |
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