There’s Nothing Wrong With Ambiguous Goals
July 10th, 2008
As long as you can boil them down to specifics.
Ha! I tricked you!
Hold on, hold on. There is a valid point here.
First of all, what are ambiguous goals? Well, Friends, they are goals that can’t really be measured quantitatively or qualitatively. “Lose some weight.” “Read more.” “Go out with a Pussy Cat Doll.” None of these goals are measurable. How much weight? What is “more”? Which Pussy Cat Doll?
Okay, I guess if your goal was to go out with any Pussy Cat Doll…
It’s true that if these goals are all you have, they don’t serve much of a purpose, but they do still pack a punch. What an ambiguous goal does is gives you a starting place. It helps you identify what’s important to you. “Lose some weight.” for example, tells me that I might be interested in reducing my body’s fat content, being healthier, looking better, etc. I can identify that losing weight, no matter how ambiguous that may sound, is important to me. I can now move forward to identifying something more specific and measurable.
My next step would then be to break that ambiguous goal down into a specific, measurable goal. “Lose 50 pounds.” or “Achieve 10% body fat or less.” are goals that I can measure. I can (and probably should) even set a deadline to meet this goal. “Lose 50 pounds by News Years Day.” This is measurable, and it was born out of an ambiguous goal to “Lose some weight.”
So go ahead and set those ambiguous goals. Write them down. They may help you identify what’s important to you; then you can go about setting more specific goals after that.
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