“Focusing on big, audacious goals feels great. It distracts me from the work required.” — Curt Fowler

So far on our habit-learning journey, we’ve learned that our habits have made us who we are and that a few good “keystone” habits can have monumentally positive impacts on our lives. This week, I want to focus on why we so often fail to reach the goals we set for ourselves.

It is early in the New Year and I’m sure plenty of us goal setters have already fallen off whatever bandwagon we knew would be the ticket for reaching our goals this year. Why is reaching our goals so difficult? Why do we fail so often? In my personal experience and research, I’ve found three primary causes of failure.

We are Looking for the Easy Way

I know this from experience. I am constantly looking for the shortcut. Apparently, most of America is also. There are two things that are always selling in America and I’d assume the rest of the world. 

1. How to get rich without hard work, and 

2. How to lose weight without reducing the calories we consume.

Think about all the commercials you see on TV and in magazines. What percentage of them are selling some variants of these two lies?

There are great studies on the rich that show most of them made their money slowly, through hard work, delivering great value and living on less than they make. 

If you want to know how to get into shape, hang out with really fit people and see how they live. 

They eat a lot of healthy stuff and move a lot. Don’t fool yourself by seeing them eat a donut on the weekend and think that is the way they live.

Looking for the easy way causes us to spend too much time researching and not enough time doing. We have a limited number of hours in this life. If we’ll spend them making consistent strides in the direction of our goals, we will win.

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.”— Colin Powell

We have too Many Goals

Focus matters. Just look at all the poor ants I killed with a magnifying glass as a kid. Focused energy gets results. We’d be achieving more at our current job if we weren’t so busy planning our next move or working on our side gig.

To be successful we must decide who we want to become and determine the next best step to get there. That next step is a habit that must become part of our lives. That habit is most likely a “keystone” habit that will cause a cascade of positive changes in our lives.

Developing that habit requires focused energy. Look at your life. How much extra focused energy do you have? I don’t have much.

The great news is that once that positive change becomes a habit, it requires very little focused energy to maintain it. Once the change becomes a habit, you will again have a little excess energy that you can use to create your next most important habit.

We are Horizon Focused 

For many of us, setting goals is fun. We get to focus on the great future that we are going to have. That is good. We need that positive picture of the future to encourage us when the work gets hard.

The problem is that too many people are telling us to just “think” about our chosen outcomes and they will somehow magically happen. I love that stuff. Thinking about my victories is a whole lot easier than getting up when my alarm clock rings! Unfortunately, I have had little success reaching my goals following this model.

Another example was getting into Kellogg for my MBA. I was completely underqualified to get into a top MBA program and Kellogg was the number one program at the time. The only thing I had going for me was being a CPA at the largest firm in the world. Getting that job is another story about hard work and failure that I can tell at another time.

There were lots of nights and weekends spent reading books about how to get accepted and writing essays for my applications. My first application was to the Wharton school because I heard they gave rejection interviews. 

As expected, I was quickly rejected and allowed to schedule a 30-minute call with the great folks at Wharton to discuss why I was rejected. What I learned in that “rejection” interview was priceless.

After another year of more work and more applications, I was accepted to the MBA program at Kellogg.

The wonderful goal must be on the horizon, but the work happens today, and tomorrow and the next day until the goal is achieved. I love this Buddhist quote:

“Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”

It’s the work that gets us to the mountaintop and it’s the work that will keep us there. The biggest benefit of achieving big goals is not achieving the goal, it is who we become during the process. I hope this column helped you because it certainly helped me realize that I have a lot of work ahead to achieve my goals this year.