My executive coach had my book sales pulled up on her screen when she stopped scrolling.
“You never actually set your intention,” she said.
I didn’t get it. I’d written the book. People were buying it. Sales were sales.
“You told me you wanted to be a bestseller,” she said. “Did you ever actually set that as your intention?”
No. What I’d said, over and over, to her, to my team, to myself, was that I wanted to sell books. I’d never once said the actual destination out loud.
So we relaunched with my intention stated plainly: I’m going to be a bestselling author.
Once I said it out loud, I could no longer hide behind “let’s see how it goes” or “I hope this does well.”
What Are Good Goal Setting Strategies That Work?
Define the specific destination with total clarity, then focus on making small progress every day.
Every goal setting strategy you’ve ever read tells you some version of the same thing: keep your eyes on the prize. Put the goal somewhere you’ll see it every day. Visualize the outcome until it pulls you toward it. But that’s only part of the story.
The other half of the story is exactly what almost kept me from becoming a bestselling author instead of just an author who sold some books.
What actually moved the number was not staring harder at the destination, but naming it with total clarity…and then getting out of my own way long enough to do the work that got me there.
I have a check on my wall right now. I wrote it to myself in 2022, made out for a million dollars. I look at it every day. It’s not motivational-poster decoration. It’s the tangible version of naming a destination instead of hiding behind a more vague desire of “I want my business to grow” or “I want to increase my wealth.”
If you’re in business, the goal isn’t “I want my business to grow.” It’s “I want a 20% increase in sales in the next 12 months.” You have to set a specific and realistic intention.
It’s much harder to get the results you want when you set vague goals. Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory, built from roughly 1,000 studies between 1968 and 2019, found that specific, clear goals consistently produce significantly higher performance than vague “do your best” goals. Clarity directs attention, mobilizes effort, and keeps you going when the work gets tedious (American Psychological Association).
That’s the half everyone already knows. Name the destination. Write it down. Make it specific enough that you’d actually know the day you arrived.
What Popular Goal Setting Strategies Miss
Here’s the part most goal setting strategy advice leaves out completely (and it’s the part that actually changed how I run my business): stop staring at the destination.
Setting the destination and staring at the destination are two different things.
Once you’ve named where you’re going, it’s not helpful to keep checking how far away it still is. Your job is to take actions that will get you there. You set the GPS. You let it tell you when to go left, when to go right, when to recalculate. Your destination is set, but you don’t get there by fixating on the pin on the map. You get there by putting in the work, making one turn at a time, and becoming someone different along the route.
Evidence-Based Ways To Actually Achieve Your Goals
Motivation research backs this up just as clearly as the goal-setting side does. Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile analyzed roughly 12,000 daily diary entries from people doing real work and found that consistent small wins (not big milestones) were the single strongest driver of day-to-day motivation and engagement (Harvard Business Review).
The destination inspires your journey, but it’s the small, daily progress that actually keeps you moving.
This goal setting strategy shows up clearly outside of the business world and bestseller lists. It wins championships, too.
Take Bill Walsh, for example. He took over the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, a team that had just finished 2-14. He didn’t stand in front of that roster and make the goal “win the Super Bowl.” He built what he called a Standard of Performance instead: a detailed, specific expectation for exactly how every person on the team would execute their job, day by day, independent of whatever the scoreboard said that Sunday. The philosophy is right there in the title he later gave his own book: The Score Takes Care of Itself. The destination (a championship) was never in question.
Walsh focused on the standard, instead of the scoreboard…and the 49ers won three Super Bowls under his leadership.
My Goal Setting Strategy in 4 Steps
None of this works as a one-time decision. It’s a handful of small, repeated habits that get you to your specific destination:
- Write the number somewhere you’ll actually see it. For example, say “I want a 20% increase in sales this year,” not “I want my business to grow.” The same goes for anything personal: be specific enough that you’d know the day you arrived.
- Set your intention each morning, then let the day run the plan. I say the same mantra every day: I am happy, I am healthy, I am successful, I am wealthy (in money, yes, and also in life, in friends, and in business). It points me in the direction I actually want to go before the day’s noise gets a chance to point me at something else.
- Simplify the process. I use a five-minute journal, morning and night to brain dump my thoughts onto paper, and identify the top three actions that will move you closer to your next evolution.
- Bring in someone who’ll tell you when you’re staring at the wrong thing. My husband is the person who asks, “Does that actually get you where you want to go, or is that just a Band-Aid?” That question has redirected many of my decisions.
Your next evolution happens by designing what’s next intentionally, then building structures and habits around what will keep you aligned as you grow.
Success Is a Direction, Not a Destination
Saying your intention out loud is scary because what if you fail? But research shows that actually saying the thing out loud makes you more likely to hit the goal than just quietly hoping it will happen.
The book didn’t become a bestseller because I stared at the word “bestseller” harder than I’d stared at “sell some books.” Instead, naming it clearly gave me something to actually build toward…and then I stopped managing the scoreboard and started managing the next turn.
That’s the real goal setting strategy nobody puts on a vision board: define your destination with total clarity, write it down, say it out loud — then stop checking on it every five minutes and go be the person who does the work to arrive.
Success is a direction, not a destination. You don’t arrive at it once and stop. You keep choosing it, turn by turn.
If this way of thinking about goals resonates, follow along for more of it, and share this with someone who’s staring at their own destination instead of driving toward it.