SIMON BROWN: Goals — in 2023, and always

I wrote about goal setting in September, and at the time cautioned about making giant, audacious goals that could never be achieved. I suggested to focus instead on small, bite-sized goals that you can notch up, one by one, and that  in time will get you to the large goal or goals you want in your life.

With New Year’s Eve now less than a dozen sleeps away I want to revisit the kind of goals we should be setting, because many of us will be tempted to make wild promises to ourselves and our loved ones about how we’ll tackle the next year and improve our lives.

Yip, these are the same New Year’s resolutions that seldom get into the second week of the year before they’re tossed out; and that’s not because we’re lazy. Rather, it’s because we are bad at setting realistic goals that we are actually able to achieve.

The key is to make the goal something you control.

Let’s say you want to grow your portfolio in 2023. Of course you do, but rather than saying you want your portfolio to be a certain rand amount at year-end or a certain percentage larger, focus on what you can control. Growth in markets, and ultimately your investments, are totally out of your control — just look at 2022. Few portfolios grew much at all, and even those that did probably only managed an increase of single digits. 

Yet you may also have deposited money every month into your portfolio. That is totally within your control, and should be your focus going into 2023.

Here the resolution should be: “I want to deposit a certain amount into my portfolio every month.” So how are you going to do this? Is extra money going to arrive magically  in your bank account every month that you can add to your portfolio? Not likely. For this resolution to be feasible you need to take a step back and have a budget that enables you to secure extra funds to deposit.

That means your first resolution should be to budget. Once again, this is a grey area, but it will help to have this in place by the first week of the year. You can then revisit it every month on pay day  to see how it is going.

Getting the process right for setting goals is everything; once we understand the two rules — making it bite sized and ensuring that you can control the outcome — formulating and achieving those resolutions is suddenly not that hard.

The last, very important point is to write down your goals. This makes them real to your brain and increases the likelihood of achieving them. Be specific, and share them with family and close friends so they can help keep you on track.