The biggest reason I fail

The biggest reason that I fail is by wildly underestimating the time that a project will take to complete.

I suspect I am not alone. My solution to this is to give myself goals that seem too easy and targets that seem almost impossible.

I am distinguishing between goals, where failure means that you have nothing to show for your work and targets, where failure means that you can still achieve a high level of success even if you miss your target.

For example. My goal could be simply to keep posting on my blog. My target could be to grow my audience from just over 300 unique visitors (where it was last weekend) to over 3000 unique visitors by next month. 10X growth seems unrealistic to me, but if miss that target dramatically and only double the size of my audience, I will still have a valuable level of success.

And having a target like that is an inspiring challenge. It’s more exciting to work towards a big target, but it is draining to fail over and over again. So that is why I am splitting the targets from the goals. Since my goal is simply to keep posting, and there are no rules about what I have to post. I can allow myself to have a goal that I will not fail.