This page was translated from Dutch with AI.
Why your SMART goal remains a wish
Recently an entrepreneur told me about his dream. He wanted to build a place where young entrepreneurs with an idea could go, with guidance, with a network, with all the trimmings. An incubator. I thought it was a wonderful plan. So I asked what was holding him back. 'I would have to win the lottery first.'
I looked at him in surprise. What is your business plan for those young entrepreneurs then? All play the lottery together? It sounds like a joke, but the story touches on something I see in almost every workshop on goals. We formulate wishes and call them goals.
Too much head, too little heart
Almost everyone knows SMART. Specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic, time-bound. When I ask the group who has heard of it, most hands go up. And yet everyone also knows the other story: good intentions in January, and the realisation in December that not much has come of them.
That is not because SMART is wrong. It is because the way we use it comes too much from the head and too little from the heart. A goal only works if you also feel something about it. That is why I make goals SMARTER, and I also change a few of the familiar letters along the way.
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