You need a goal. If you don't have a career coach or a manager who is talking with you about your career development, then this five minutes may be the most important five minutes of a podcast that you ever listen to. Not because I have some special opinion that is unique to me, but instead because a goal, a well-positioned goal, could be the most important thing that you have in your career. We're going to talk a little bit about why that's the case in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. This is Developer Tea. My goal on the show is to help driven developers. Developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. Goals hit all three of those things. Goals hit clarity. They hit perspective, and they hit purpose, especially clarity. If nothing else, a goal provides clarity. But good goals also speak to perspective and purpose. Now, a lot of people... Myself included... Have struggled in the past with setting goals. And a lot of the reason for this is because we don't really practice with setting our own goals very much in our lives before we get into our careers. And very often, managers don't do this very well either. All right? I'm a manager. I know this. There's no good... There's no good auditing system that I've ever been a part of at any company that does a good job of ensuring that people have clear goals. Okay? You may have heard all of the acronyms, like SMART goals. Those concepts, those frameworks are good. You know, there's... I say those. I mean, some of those frameworks are good. Don't go use everyone out there and think that it's going to fix your problem, though. Right? A SMART goal... We'll just go through this one framework to kind of explain what I mean there. A SMART goal is specific, measurable. I think it's attainable. It is relevant. And it's time-bound. Right? That's what the SMART, S-M-A-R-T, stands for in SMART goal. And certainly, those things are good checks. Right? Those are good things to ensure that your goal, you know, kind of meets certain criteria. For example, if you don't have a measurable goal, it's hard to know when you've met it. That can result in some bad behavior around your goal. Right? A never-ending goal, for example. Right? There's one letter in there that a lot of people get lost on. Relevant. The R in SMART. How do I know if my goal is relevant? How do I know if it's the right goal? How do I even determine a goal in the first place? That's kind of the core of that. Right? You know, if it's specific and measurable and actionable and time-bound, none of that matters if it's irrelevant. The most important thing that you can have in your goal is relevance. Right? So that's why I say there's frameworks. There's certainly nothing wrong. There's certainly nothing wrong with them. But I want to focus in on this one specific factor, which is how do I decide what goal to set in the first place? I want to demystify or kind of take the, I don't know, the magic out of goals. You know, it feels like this big idea, this big thing that we're going to set five-year goals or that we're going to, you know, decide our future. Right? In some ways, you know, we're kind of programmed. If you went to college and you had a degree, then choosing your major, right, kind of felt similar to this. You know, we imagine that choosing our major would somehow solidify our direction in life. And that we're kind of choosing our path forever. Most people probably know that that's not the case. In most cases, your major did not decide. You know, the right goal. The rest of your life and your career and every other step after that. Of course, it can impact it. Right? So that's why it's important to pick goals that make sense. But the goal of the goal, right? Why do we care about having goals in the first place? Why do we care about creating clarity in our work in the first place? The goal of the goal is to give you a way to make a decision about what to do. This is a clarifying, prioritizing, focusing effort. Right? When you walk into work, if you don't have a goal, someone else is going to take advantage of your time. That's not their fault. They're not doing anything wrong. But they're going to give you something to do. And we might believe, in my opinion, wrongly. That our goal is to do the things that we are handed to do. As a software engineer, this is kind of a backwards way of thinking. Right? That your goal is just to do the work that's handed to you. To finish the work that's assigned to you. Now, don't take me wrong. If you are getting work assigned to you and you're having a discussion with your manager that, hey, is this the right work for me? You know, should I be working on this? This versus something else? All of those things are in line. Then yes, of course. Doing work that's assigned to you. I'm not telling you to go and, you know, disregard that. That's a fast way to lose your job. What I am saying is, if your goal is just to output. If your goal is only to do the things that are being asked of you to do. Then the things that you're doing are going to be the things that you're going to be doing. The things that you care about in your career. The kinds of changes you want to make in your career. Whether that's growing into a new role. Growing into a new domain. Maybe gaining new skills. Right? It's going to be hard to do. Nobody else around you is working to ensure that your skills are being developed. Necessarily. Right? Maybe if you have a good manager, they're working with you on that. But my guess is. If you have a good manager who's working with you on your skill development. They're doing it through the lens of setting good goals with you. Okay? So, goals. The whole point of a goal is to have a focus. A way of focusing your effort. So, if you are sitting here and you're like, okay. I hear you. I've heard talk. You know, people have talked to me about goals. I know about smart framework. I know about, you know, all these other ways. All the reasoning why. But I still don't know how to set a goal. I don't know, you know, what direction. Write down on the paper. My advice for you is to start relatively small. Start relatively small. And focus primarily on the kinds of goals. Or rather on the output. The outcome of the goal. So, if you're stuck trying to figure out what a goal should be. Instead, focus on the things that you want. What do you want to be true? Maybe you want. So, really what we're saying is kind of focusing on outcomes. Or why. Right? Why do I care about changing anything? I want to make more money. That's a simple one. Right? I want to, you know, learn this particular skill. Or maybe I want to be doing this particular thing. And so, we often mistake that the outcome is the goal. That we imagine that some kind of future state. That we set that up as our goal off into the distance. Making more money is our goal. This can be considered a type of goal. But it is typically a lagging indicator. A lagging goal. All right? So, in other words. If you could just go and do something to make more money. Then you would probably do that. Right? So, your goal of wanting to make more money. There's a bunch of stuff in between you and that. So, how do you get there? Right? So, the point of this kind of small goal is to take a step in the right direction. And when I say right direction. The thing that most people would get caught up on. Is believing that right direction has to be perfect direction. And so, instead of taking a direction in generally the right direction. Right? Or instead of taking a step, you know, towards the right direction. They take no steps. Because they're afraid that they're going to go the wrong direction. This is a mistake. Right? If you set a goal. And you set the goal to be, you know, the phrase that we use is directionally correct. Right? It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to take you exactly in the right direction. But it takes you generally in the right direction. So, for example. Let's say that your goal or your outcome goal. Your long-term goal is you want to lead teams. A directionally correct goal might be to lead a project. Right? A goal that you may have is to lead a project with a team. As a tech lead. As somebody. As some kind of technical planning capacity. Right? You want to be held responsible for the architecture. Okay? That's the goal that you have now. Right? Your long-term goal is to lead teams. Your long-term goal is to maybe to become a manager. But your shorter-term goal is one project. Right? This doesn't necessarily take you exactly in the direction of leading teams. But it's directionally correct. Right? So, you know, directionally incorrect would be something like, you know, picking up all of the bug tickets for your team. Maybe. You could probably make an argument for that being a fine goal, too. Right? This is the interesting thing. When we set goals, it gives us to focus. Right? It helps us kind of wrap our actions around a specific direction. And then, perhaps the most important thing, is it gives us something to reflect on. Okay? So, if you are a tech lead and you're assigned to this tech lead role and you get a bunch of interactions where you're working directly with other engineers. And you get a chance to do a little bit of mentorship, maybe. Now you can reflect and say, okay. That goal. I met that goal. Did it take me closer? Did it take me closer? Did it take me closer? Or further away from my long-term outcome that I care about? Was that the right kind of goal? Okay. Yes. It sounds like it was. Or no. It seems like I didn't get any closer to my outcome goal. Great. This small goal has not put you off by the wayside. Excuse me. It hasn't put you off by the wayside. It hasn't, you know, waylaid your career. Instead, it's given you a new kind of directional input. Right? Some steering. But your goal construction here is focused on taking you in the directionally correct direction. Right? So, it's less important that you get exactly the right goal in place. Now, maybe you're still sitting here. You're like, okay. Yes, I hear you. But I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... I still... should be. Here's a very simple heuristic for you. And this works for most people. Try to imagine sitting in your boss's seat and reviewing your performance in six months from now. What are the things that you care about? If you don't know, you probably will benefit from finding out. But if you do know, the things that your boss is going to care about might be good things to set goals around. This is very generic advice, of course. This advice will help you grow in your career, most likely, because it will help you get better evaluations, most likely. So it's very generic advice. But if you're struggling to figure out, okay, just generally, I want to do good at my job. Right? I want to be good in my role. I want my boss to think that I'm good at what I do. That's a pretty common kind of career posture that you don't want to do poorly on your next performance review. Great. So now let's set a goal to make sure that doesn't happen. Right? So your goal is going to be focused, especially on how your boss will evaluate you. Right? Why not? Focus on that. If your boss is going to evaluate you on, let's say, your total throughput, and he or she is determining your total throughput by looking at the number of times that you ship to production, set a goal around shipping to production. There's nobody who's going to keep you from doing that. Right? There's nobody who's going to stop you from doing that. And you can be very honest. With your manager, most likely, unless they're a difficult person to work with, or you have some other reason not to be honest with them. You can be very honest with your manager and say, I'm in the process of setting goals for myself so that I grow. I specifically want to set goals that are related to my performance. How do you judge it? What kind of factors do you consider? What makes a great engineer in your eyes? What do you care about? Seek that feedback with your manager. It's very possible that your manager is going to look at you and say, the thing that I care about for this quarter is shipping that project. In fact, I would say probably eight or nine out of 10 managers, that is actually what they care about. If you can set a goal that helps achieve those larger organizational goals, and you can explain how you did it, that's another huge career win for you. So focus on, if you have no idea how to set a goal, if you have zero experience, you don't really have any clear outcomes that you care about yet, you just want to do well in your career, focus specifically on setting goals around how your boss is going to evaluate you six months or a year from now. If you don't have a boss that can clearly articulate how he's going to evaluate you, how she's going to evaluate you, do it for yourself. Imagine how you would evaluate you. If you were looking for a great engineer, maybe you're interviewing engineers. What kind of experience, what kind of actions, what kind of values are you looking for? These are all kind of basis topics for you to set goals around. A very important thing to be able to do when you're setting goals is to recognize, when you're bringing your goals together, when you're bringing your goals together, the stretch is. Okay. When are you reaching your limit? Most goals, most goals tend not to be met for one of two very simple reasons. Okay. One, the goal is too abstract, right? It's not tractable exactly what to do. So it's not actionable. It's not clear what to do to meet the goal. Remember we said my goal is to make more money, but how do I do that? Well, I don't really know. And so I'm going to stop here, right? So it's not tractable. The other reason is that you've either over or underestimated your capacity enough that you become disengaged. Over or under can cause disengagement. So if you underestimate your capacity, right? If you set a goal that is so easy to meet that it's not even a challenge, you may actually disengage from that goal entirely because it doesn't feel like a challenge. It doesn't feel like you're accomplishing anything, right? Maybe you, maybe you accomplish it. Maybe you don't. Um, but it's not a challenge. It doesn't feel like an accomplishment. It doesn't really feel like you've met a goal per se, right? Um, um, so that's one reason. And that's a preferable reason over the second one. Okay. I guess we're on like the third reason technically here, but, uh, over subscribing, right? Setting a goal that ultimately is demoralizing. You've set your stretch goal to double your throughput. For example, the likelihood that you're going to double that output that you have, uh, as an engineer is extremely low. It's extremely low. So, uh, meeting that goal is unlikely. And when you actually start trying to do that, you're likely to recognize that you set an unrealistic goal for yourself. And then you disengage because no matter how much effort you put forward, you're going to get limited by, uh, you know, what is even possible, right? So you'll hit that limit and then you become demoralized. And then you quit the goal, right? You quit actually trying. It's much more effective to have a goal where you have, let's say a 60% chance of, of success, something along those lines, right? I'm not really sure what the exact number would be. There are actually studies about this. So you can go find out what the number is. If you do find out, come let me know. Okay. Uh, but some percent chance, some, um, um, chance that you're going to succeed. That is not 100. That is not even 90, but it's also not zero or 10, right? You want something that is challenging that you have a real chance of failure, right? But you also have a really, a real shot at success. It's going to take hard work. It's going to take a focus. It's going to take saying no to things. Remember, this is the whole point of having the goal in the first place. And so you have a framework to help you focus, to help you say no to something. Okay. So setting your goal, you should need to say no to something. You should need to focus to be able to achieve it. You shouldn't have to, uh, you know, sacrifice every night and every weekend to achieve your goal. Uh, you, uh, you, uh, you, uh, you, uh, you, uh, you, uh, you, uh, you, uh, you, uh, you, probably shouldn't have to, you know, perform some kind of, uh, crazy out of bounds thing that you wouldn't want to do on a regular basis. That's not a sustainable way to set a goal. Okay. Your goals should be set in a way that requires you to focus, but it's sustainable. You're not burning out, trying to meet your own goals. If you do that, you will end up quitting at some point or another, maybe not on this goal, but on the next one, right? It's not sustainable. So set your goals to be challenging, but not debilitating. That middle ground is critical. Okay. And ensuring that they have tractability. Once again, looking at the reason you're looking at, what is the thing that you're trying to accomplish here? And if you have nothing else to go on, the most basic heuristic is to think about how you're evaluated. Think about, uh, what is the thing that you're trying to accomplish here? And if you have nothing else to go on, the most basic heuristic is to think about how you're evaluated. Think about, what does success look like? How do I achieve success? And what is the gap between me and success? If you don't know how to achieve success, this is where you, uh, you know, really track down your hound, your manager hound, whoever determines your successful path, whoever is, uh, you know, the arbiter of whether you get a promotion, whether you get a raise, whoever is responsible for that kind of, um, you know, gating on your career, go and talk to them, ask them, what is it that you see that needs to change in order for you to put me up for that in order for you to, you know, suggest a raise for me? What is a home run? What, what looks like a huge success? Most of the time managers would like to talk about that, but they can't find the perfect time to do it. You know, sometimes the day-to-day gets in the way of talking about the bigger picture. You start the conversation. Right. If you own that conversation, if you say, you know what, I want to spend our next one-on-one talking about career growth and about setting goals, your manager will, will not only, uh, will very likely appreciate that, right. They'll very, very well, we'll very likely appreciate it, especially if you frame it in through the lens of, you know, this needs to be a win for you, the manager, right. Not just, Hey, tell me all of the ways that I can succeed. Right. That's, that's not what they're looking. That feels more like a challenge. Bring this as an opportunity. Hey, direct me, tell me where to go. Tell me how I can make a huge impact, right? That's what they're looking, you know, managers really do want that. Um, if you come with that conversation, you're going to have a list of goals just handed to you. You may have to go and refine them, make them fit into the smart framework or whatever, but you'll have a huge list that you can go and act on right away. Take that list, evaluate it, see if it's taking you where you want to go in your career, right? Maybe there's a bigger thing to think about here, but directionally correct is all you're really looking for. You're not really, this is not about setting your life purpose. We said, this is going to help you with your purpose. It will, but this is about making a bunch of small bets, a bunch of milestone goals on your way to your larger goal. Make mistakes with these goals. You can still meet the goal. It'll still help you in your career. It'll still probably get you things that you want in your career, but it doesn't have to be a perfect goal. It's not going to define your long-term success, consistency, and doing this over and over and over will. Thank you so much for listening to developer T. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope that you are going to be energized by this. I hope that you will evaluate, self-evaluate whether you have clear goals, sitting in front of you, or if you need to go and make them. And I encourage you to go make them right away. There's nothing to stop you from doing that now. Don't wait until the next performance cycle. Don't wait for your manager. Start on it on your own, right? Go do it now. I'd love to hear about your goal setting. If you want to join the developer T discord community, head over to developer T.com slash discord. Joining that is totally free. You can always join as a listener of the show. Other listeners of the show are there as well. If you enjoyed this episode, go and leave a review in iTunes. Of course, now we are starting to publish these on YouTube. We don't have a ton up yet. We haven't done historical recording, video recording yet. Still getting some of the kinks worked out, but you should be able to see this on YouTube shortly after we record it. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.