On my vision board, there is a picture of a person who matters to me. Around it are the things that must be achieved in alignment with what that picture represents. My vision board travels with me everywhere. On my iPad screen every time it opens. Framed on the wall of my closet at home, which is my personal space, the one I go to when I need to be me in a very defined way. It keeps my courage up where I need it to be.
Courage. That is the word worth reaching for when we think about what a goal actually requires. Strategy is the plan you build once you know what you are moving toward. Courage is what keeps the destination alive long enough to build the plan.
Wishes are not Goals. That has always been true, and it is still true. Goals carry strategies, avoiding wasted thoughts. Yet there is a second error now, quieter and more costly that can occur around this: people are forsaking their goals in favor of their strategies. Moving so fast toward what feels achievable that what was worth wanting gets left behind. You arrive at a completion point, count the check marks, and realize somewhere in the accumulation the original destination went missing. It is sad when that happens. Sad because the person did the work and still did not get what they were after, and the reason has nothing to do with their effort.
The ownership of a home is an example worth holding. Researchers at Northwestern and the University of Chicago published a study on what happens when people stop believing they will ever own a home. They titled it “Giving Up.” What they found is that once the goal feels permanently out of reach, behavior changes entirely: saving stops, consumption rises, work effort drops, and risk tolerance climbs to places it never would have gone. The aspiration dies and the conduct follows it down. This is a goal story wearing a housing story’s clothes, and it is playing out right now across some members of a generation who have decided their path is closed.
Don’t give up on the idea of having a home. A house is not a home. Yet the aspiration of home, of stability, of something built and lasting, of a place that is yours, is worth protecting even when the path has altered the course you must take. The goal you had when you were so much fresher in your adult life may express itself differently than you first imagined. Keeping it alive positions you to recognize the path when it opens. Abandoning it forecloses options you have not yet imagined. That thing you leave off because of what you are afraid of today may be the very thing that could have been the highlight of your goal.
It is not an either/or circumstance. Having a long-term goal you cannot yet reach be supported by a strategy for what is achievable right now, can coexist. What cannot coexist is forsaking the goal for the sake of the check marks.
On a vision board there is usually a picture or a quickly worded outcome. The company goal may be $1,000,000 in sales. The personal vision may be the house you have eyed and intend to buy. Underneath that house are the transactions, the values, and the timelines required to reach it, and one of those may well be the company’s number. The aspiration is not the strategy. The aspiration is what makes the strategy worth executing.
At ActOne, we celebrate this distinction every year through Founders Club. The people who reach certain results earn an all-expenses-paid trip. Jamaica one year, the Dominican Republic the next. Hawaii and Mexico before that. A gala night, the red carpet rolled out, beautiful names called from a stage, many bringing children or significant others along to share the celebration. In the offices, long before anyone has earned anything, the vision boards go up in some employee lounges with pictures of next year’s destination, the team goal written out beside a thermometer marking the progress toward it. What comes back to me time after time from the people who arrive at Founders Club is that it was the vision board that steered them there. By the time we reach that celebration, tremendous accomplishment has already been made. Most of the time, what they earned first was something important to somebody else. A gift to a community charity. A school they wanted to support or send a child to. The trip is not the destination. It is the proof that the aspiration held.
Goals must be checked regularly and moved as soon as achieved, lest stagnation occur. The revision worth resetting is not the timeline. A missed deadline does not retire a goal. Deciding the goal is no longer worth reaching for does. That decision tends to arrive dressed as realism, and sometimes the circumstances producing it are real. Yet real and permanent are not the same thing.
Forty-eight years of building a company and placing people into work has taught one lesson above all others about aspiration. The people who reach what they were after are often not the ones who had the smoothest path. They are the ones who kept the picture on the wall when the path changed. They are the ones whose courage outlasted the circumstance. They are the one who understood that ‘Together, We Win’.
Goals are not wishes. They are the reason the strategy exists at all. Keep the picture on the wall.