CHAPTER 2-3
             CHOOSING GOALS AND CRITERIA OF SUCCESS


     How many books and articles should I write?  How much of my 
time should I spend writing, and how much with family, friends, 
community, students?  What should I say if my department asks me 
to teach an additional course?  
     If I am to arrive at a well-reasoned answer to questions 
such as these, I must know what my goals are.  I also need to 
know various goals for their use as criteria for my personal 
cost-benefit analyses.     
     Two sets of considerations bear upon one's choice of goals -
- desires, and capacities.  From your capacities you can deduce 
what is possible.  And your desires tell you how valuable the 
various possibilities are for you.  For example, you might have 
extraordinary talent as a poker player, but according to your 
values, making a fortune at poker-playing is of little worth 
because it benefits no one else, and hurts the losers.  You 
therefore might exclude professional poker-playing as a life 
choice.  Similarly, you might decide against being a musician, 
despite the high value you place on making music for others and 
yourself, because you think you have too little talent to create 
great music or make a decent living at it.  In contrast, your 
considerable capacity to lead people -- to motivate them, direct 
them, and achieve high performance and morale with them -- might 
fit with your high value for contributing to the welfare of the 
local community, implying that a career in firefighting or crowd 
management might be a wise goal. 
     Knowing the uses of goals helps us set our goals.  1) A goal 
can focus your attention, mobilize your resources, and motivate 
you toward specific attainments.  2) A goal also serves as a 
chart for your progress.  Measuring your progress assists you in 
making further plans, and in maintaining enthusiasm rather than 
becoming either complacent or despairing.  3) To the extent that 
we follow plans rather than just drift into things -- though 
drifting with the tides is not always bad -- goals influence how 
we dispose of our lives -- what we do with our time and energies.  
In this sense, goals are indistinguishable from life choices. 
     Wise goal selection enables you to make a contribution to 
the community as well as to satisfy your desires.  You thereby 
gain the satisfaction of using your capacities productively.  
Indeed, arriving at appropriate goals either by thinking the 
matter through, or by trial and error, is an important element in 
achieving happiness.  People frequently learn to trim down over-
ambitious goals which they fail to achieve and which therefore 
cause them mental distress.  Sometimes people learn to scale up 
from overly-modest goals which afford too little sense of 
satisfaction that they are using their capacities sufficiently, 
and too little sense of reward from the product of their efforts. 
     A goal should be sufficiently difficult that it will present 
a challenge and stretch your abilities.  But it must not be 
unattainable, or seem unattainable.  If it seems unattainable, 
you may give up before you begin.  (T. S. Elliot said the same of 
a poem -- it must be easy enough to understand, but hard enough 
so you cannot understand it immediately.)  If a goal is 
unattainable and you go after it anyway, the consequent failure 
may cause you pain and diminish your energies.  
     Sports in which the aim is to win against another person are 
not a good model for goal-setting in the rest of your life and 
business.  In my experience, a person usually does best in work 
and personal life by trying to do well with respect to one's 
capacities and values rather than by trying to do better than 
another person or organization.  A better sports model is trying 
to make good shots or a low score in golf, or a fast time in 
running relative to your personal history, or making clean pretty 
throws in judo, no matter who wins the match.       Some people 
need specific goals more than others.  I do not benefit from a 
tight agenda or a set of deadlines for the work I am doing.  
Specific goals just disturb me.  For some people, though, goals 
prevent floundering or procrastinating.  
     Making a written inventory of your capacities and your 
desires can help you set goals by forcing you to make your 
thoughts more objective and more cogent than they are likely to 
be if you just let them float around inside your head.   
Discussions with other people also help you systematize and 
discipline your thoughts.  Those two simple suggestions -- which 
apply to every other kind of heavy-duty thinking, too -- are all 
that I can offer.  But if you follow these suggestions, they may 
be all the advice you need. Conversely, you should avoid just 
stewing endlessly with the same old elements if you seem to be 
making no progress.  Talk and write -- these are powerful tools. 
     How does the process of goal selection resemble the process 
of cost-benefit analysis?  Capacities are related to costs, but 
in an inverse fashion:  the greater your capacities, the less 
your costs in accomplishing a particular object.  And desires are 
related to benefits; an objective "benefit" has no meaning to you 
unless you desire it.  
     Choosing a goal is like a cost-benefit analysis in which the 
costs are fixed in advance -- by your capacities -- and your task 
is to choose that alternative that will provide the greatest 
revenue for the specified cost structure.  Here again we see a 
link between two types of thinking that at first glance do not 
seem to have anything in common -- one of the themes that runs 
through this book. 
     Choosing goals involves other goals and values.  For 
example, should the goal of a youth group be simply for the kids 
to have a good time, or should it also attempt to make a 
contribution to the community? 
     Choosing goals involves an entire hierarchy of goals -- the 
very long run and fundamental goals, the sub-goals that are part 
of the larger effort, and the daily sub-sub-daily goals. 
     For a non-profit organization, goals are constrained by the 
organization's history as well as by its present composition and 
program.  The organization should aim to clarify its options so 
that those persons with a stake in the organization -- its 
beneficiaries, staff, and donors -- can thrash out the issues and 
reach some consensus about what the goals should be.  Often, a 
key issue is how broad or specialized the organization should be 
-- whether it should aim at many goals, or just a few.  For 
example, should your state university attempt to offer a very 
wide range of programs, or should it attempt to concentrate upon 
a few programs in which it already is strong?     
     What should a non-profit organization do when it achieves 
its goal, as Chapter 2-1 noted was the case with the March of 
Dimes when polio (infantile paralysis) was conquered?  The 
organization could disband, of course.  But that might be a waste 
of an expensive investment in organization.  (More about this in 
Chapter 2-1).) 
     Setting goals for other people is a difficult business. For 
example, the centrally-planned Soviet economy must set goals for 
each factory in order to evaluate performance.  But it is almost 
impossible -- perhaps just plain impossible -- to set goals that 
will do what they are intended to do.  For example, if the goal 
for a nail factory is set in terms of a number of nails, the 
manager will produce only small nails because they require less 
raw material and less work per million.  If the goal is shifted 
to a weight of nails, the manager will make only large nails 
because they require less work per kilogram.  If the goal is set 
as some combination of these two attributes, there must be some 
formula to trade off shortfalls or overages in the goals on the 
two dimensions.  And it will still possible for the manager to 
shave on quality unless that is made part of the goal system.  
This goal-setting problem is one of the best arguments for 
private enterprise wherein profit is an efficient overall goal. 
     When others set goals for you, you must consider whether 
your resources enable you to achieve the goals.  When I was a 
young officer in the Navy, I was responsible for getting the 
decks, sides and seamanship gear ship-shape for a major 
inspection following a period in the shipyard.  My divisions were 
grossly undermanned but I did not recognize that fact fully, nor 
did I know how to argue for more resources.  The result was a 
poor inspection grade followed by my painful firing from a job 
which I liked very much.  A sensible manager learns how to fight 
for resources to meet goals or to point out that the goals cannot 
be met with existing resources. 
     To summarize, then:  Your goals should be set with an eye to 
your capacities.  But they should not be set only with regards to 
your capacities and the personal rewards to them.  Some goals are 
better than others, according to some hierarchical scheme of 
values. 

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