Greater Clarity Comes From Bigger Goals

What if setting big goals, impossible goals even, was actually an easier way to move forward?

It’s counterintuitive because we usually assume a big goal creates more challenge, complexity, pressure, stress.

But sometimes the opposite happens.

Small goals leave us with endless options for how to achieve them. If your goal is simply to save a little more money this year, almost anything qualifies. Skip a few coffees. Clip coupons. Pick up a few extra hours at work. Open a higher interest yield savings account.

Making those small gains is great when you redirect that cashflow intentionally, but it's also hard to know where to focus because almost every idea could move the needle a little. It’s relatively easy to do any of those options, and just as easy to ignore them and assume you’ll change somewhere else.

But what if your goal was to pay off your mortgage in ten years? Or five years?

Or build a year's worth of expenses in savings?

Or retire five years earlier than planned?

Now the list of possible actions shrinks dramatically because you’re talking a bigger game.

Various tiny improvements aren't enough anymore.

The goal itself starts filtering your options.

And this makes you begin asking different, better questions.

What would have to be true to make that possible?

What approach has the biggest impact, the biggest bang for your buck?

What do I need to stop spending attention towards because it ultimately won't get me there?

In this way, a big, audacious goal creates more clarity than anything else. Your feet are to the fire because it takes real transformation to achieve such goals.

Will you reach every ambitious goal you set?

Probably not.

A few years ago I set myself the goal of becoming conversationally fluent in Spanish in just a few months. I fell well short of that target. But I learned far more Spanish than I ever would have if I'd aimed for something safer and easier. And I developed fast clarity on what methods worked for me and which didn’t.

The same thing happens with our financial aspirations.

You may not pay off your mortgage in ten years.

You may not double your savings as quickly as you'd hoped.

You may not reach financial independence by fifty.

But in pursuing a goal that stretches you, you'll spend differently, save more intentionally, ask better questions, and discover opportunities you wouldn't have noticed or pursued otherwise.

You’ll have learned and grown in new ways. And that creates more possibilities and traction than you could have made otherwise.

Whether you achieve the goal isn't the measure of success, though it’s amazing when that happens.

The bigger question is whether that big impossible goal caused you to narrow down to better options, make better decisions, and build stronger habits that moved you faster in your targeted direction.