Small Enough to Fail

December 30th, 2011 — 5:35am

Maybe we have a tendency to dream of epic goals like saving the world, curing cancer, or reforming our political system. Goals like that have the grand exhilaration of big ambition without the scary responsibilities of actual success or meaningful failure. Those goals make it hard for anyone to challenge us with “Why don’t you go do that tomorrow.” or criticize us with “How come you didn’t get that done?”

I think such grand and vague goals are really just pleasant fantasies. I think we can more difference with gritty real-life goals that can be started today, and might succeed or fail this week or this year.

I hope you dream big and stretch beyond what you think you can do. To get there from here, set goals that are specific enough and possible enough that you can create real accountability to them.