There has always been a delicate balance in goal setting between what can be done and what could be done. Goals should be realistic and achievable but they also must be courageous and challenging. Safe is not good enough anymore and we must be willing to take risks that stretch us outside our comfort zone to achieve greatness.
I absolutely love this quote that is extremely timely in our current environment, “Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much no suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt, 1899
When President Kennedy said in the early 60’s we are going to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of this decade the overwhelmingly majority of people thought he had lost his mind, and yet we did it.
The world has changed dramatically in the last decade. The power of technology and the globalization of all the world economies are driving change in unprecedented ways that no one could have imagined either just a few years ago. When this recession is over we are never going back to the ways things used to be.
What goals are you setting for yourself and your organization that are commensurate for the challenges that lie ahead in the 21st century? They must be big hairy and audacious if they are going to lead to outstanding performance.