Why S.M.A.R.T goals don’t work ...

Have you ever felt like you’re capable of so much more—like there’s untapped potential waiting to be unleashed? Imagine a life where you’re not just chasing goals but smashing through them, defying limits, and becoming the person you were truly meant to be.

This week, we’re exploring a bold, transformative approach to goal-setting—one that challenges the status quo and pushes you to think bigger, act bolder, and dream without boundaries.

Forget settling for what’s ‘realistic.’ Forget playing it safe. It’s time to embrace the kind of goals that light a fire in your soul, stretch your imagination, and demand that you rise to the occasion.

In theory, it sounds like a useful acronym that satiates the human need for compartmentalization, but the idea of a SMART goal to me is more like the tail wagging the dog and only serving to conveniently fit a word that has some tentative association to a goal; a ‘smart’ goal.

Goals can indeed and should be specific, and yes, it’s useful to be able to measure the progress to quantify the journey, but achievable, realistic, and time-based—I have big problems with. Let me attempt to change your paradigm on these last three parts of this peeve of an acronym…

The whole purpose of a goal is not necessarily to arrive at that goal but what and how you develop in pursuit of said goal. When you aspire to anything in life, you switch your RAS (Reticular Activating System) to begin looking for solutions and answers to overcome the challenge.

By setting big, grandiose goals, you actually stretch and grow yourself.

In addition, and this is a more relevant point for me, if you know how to achieve the desired goal, then it actually ceases to be a goal and becomes relegated to a mere task you have not yet completed. With that in mind, associating the acronym SMART to a task is fair enough. But not a goal—this is something very special.

Finally, when we grade something as ‘achievable,’ we base that assumption on our current level of awareness and understanding, and that assumption is typically based on the level of education, intel, knowledge, or insight that we have to hand in any given moment.

As Albert Einstein himself stated: you cannot solve a problem at the same level of awareness as to where it was created.

Pretty much the same ballpark.

What is the point in giving your time and energy to a ‘realistic’ goal? Once again, a ‘realistic goal’ just sounds more like a task you’ve not yet completed as opposed to an exciting, audacious challenge that will stretch you, grow you, and keep you developing for a protracted period of time.

The human brain is simultaneously a complex but, in some ways, wonderfully simple thing. It is surprisingly easy to programme the brain just as it is to programme a computer.

The problem with ‘wanting’ something teaches the brain to stay in the feeling and space of ‘want.’ This may sound too far of a stretch, but if you can imagine you’ve already achieved the goal, your brain and its entire neurology and wiring will start to behave as if you already have the outcome.

The brain is not capable of distinguishing between what is real and what is imagined; this is why, for example, we can raise our own heart rate by a mere thought, or we may find our palms start sweating when thinking about the edge of a tall building. If you really believe that you have already achieved the goal, you will actually start to act, behave, live, and perform like the finished article, and this is a conditioning response that involves every one of the 60 trillion cells of the body.

So with all that being said, I would advise against ‘SMART’ goals but rather advise you to opt for a SMH (Specific, Measurable, Huge) goal, one that feels scary and makes you immediately question your ability. That’s the only way we can really force ourselves to change — for the better.