Here’s the wonderful and awful thing about choices: all too often you have more of them than you have the time to explore. However, if you’re going to actually see your labors bear fruit you have to exert some discipline.

Setting Goals

Before you can achieve the goals you have to be specific about what they are. If your goals are too broad, you’ll be unable to create a clear plan to achieve them. If your goals are too varied or diverse, your resources will be scattered and progress will be very slow.

What is it you truly, specifically, want to achieve?

Your major obstacle to, say, improved customer satisfaction isn’t technology or corporate willpower, it’s time. You’ve only got so many people who can work so many hours in a day. That means your goals must be a matter of priority and focus.

Sometimes that means good options must be tabled so better ones can be achieved. Or the easy path needs to be ignored so you can devote your time and team to the harder, but ultimately more successful road.

Goals vs. Desires

It’s important to distinguish between goals and desires. Goals are future-focused and desires are of the moment or short-term at best. If you want to achieve the goal of transitioning your company to utilizing a next-generation back office, you’ll have to resist the desire to try quick short-cuts to meet quarterly numbers or an ad hoc patch that fits the budget or a “solution” that’s only good on paper.

Chasing short-term desires instead of focusing on long-term goals will hold you back from success.

Achieving your goals means not letting your day-to-day routine dominate your work. If your goals are more than just small steps forward, they usually require more than the usual amount of work, putting some everyday tasks on hold, delegating some of your work, or even deciding that it’s no longer something that should be done.

Goals Should Be a Bit Uncomfortable

Many entrepreneurs subscribe to the philosophy of “Ready. Fire. Aim.”

They believe that if they wait until conditions are perfect for success, they’ll never act. Or they’ll achieve the most superficial of goals at best.

Whether you can achieve your goals shouldn’t be the issue. Perhaps your company needs to transition to an entirely new ERP system. An enormous undertaking? Perhaps. But companies take on enormous challenges all the time. Google has their moon shots, Lockheed has their Skunk Works, and Elon Musk has blown up dozens of rockets in his ongoing quest to get to Mars.

None of them are ever entirely sure their goals are achievable. Of course, there is a difference between ambitious and ridiculous. SpaceX isn’t trying to invent a warp drive. Lockheed isn’t working on teleporters. Their goals push the envelope, but don’t require the paper be made from pixie dust and moonbeams.

It’s also true that many of their goals have to be adjusted based on changing technology, or new data requires that they pivot to a new and more ambitious goal.

The point is the goals that transform companies are ambitious.

If You Don’t Believe, You Won’t Achieve

Yes, it’s a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You have to believe that you, your team, and your company can achieve what you set out to accomplish.

If you approach your goals with an expectation of failure, you will meet your expectation. If you believe that hard work and creativity will eventually result in success—even if it’s not of your original goal—you’ll succeed.

You may need to break your larger, grander goal into more easily achieved steps. David Allan, author of Getting Things Done is a big proponent of this. Belief doesn’t mean you can’t take small steps to achieve big gains.

You’re Not Alone

One of the many advantages of an always-connected world is that answers are everywhere. If you don’t have the right one, someone out there certainly does and has probably posted a YouTube video or published a white paper explaining it in detail.

If, for instance, you want to implement a managed IT program, you have only to gain by using someone else’s hard-won experience to help you achieve that.

Not All Progress Is Forward

It would be great if every step we took moved us closer to our goals, but inevitably some of those steps will be backward.

Market upheavals, upper management errors, stakeholder turnover, technology paradigm shifts, these are all inevitable for any business. The key is knowing that while these may delay your progress, they rarely have the power in and of themselves to halt it for good.

The Wrap-up

To achieve your goals, you first need to know what they specifically are. Along the way to achieving them, it’s important not to get sidetracked by short-term desires and to always remember that you’re only limited by your own creativity, your own willingness to work hard, and your own belief in yourself and your organization.

Contact us to learn more about how Denovo can help you achieve your goals.