The 6 Pieces of Goal-Setting Advice I Keep Coming Back To

My favourite ideas for setting goals, planning ahead and making meaningful progress, all gathered together in one place.

There’s no single right way to set goals or plan your future. Over the years, I’ve come across many ideas that have changed the way I think about progress.

Here are six of the ideas I’ve found most useful, and keep coming back to:

1. Your Next Five Moves 

A five-year plan can feel too daunting for many. Some even recommend against it, arguing that we can’t know what we’ll want in five years, or how our current predictions will align with our future values or interests. 

That’s where thinking in moves instead of years can be a helpful alternative. This really resonated with me when I read the book, Your Next Five Moves by Patrick Bet-David. 

The book proposes that you think and move like a chess Grandmaster - planning several moves ahead with the big picture in mind. A chess player does not just consider their next immediate move; they anticipate what might happen next - they see the bigger picture and how everything interplays together. 

Your next five moves mindset still requires you to have a clear understanding of what you want. It’s clarity before direction. However, you don’t have to think in years or months. You can choose the timing that best suits you, your goals and vision, so long as you’re seeing how the moves fit into a bigger picture. 

I have personally taken this approach over the last few years. I have a very simple Notes entry in my phone and map my next five moves. Not in years - just by strategy and what deadline best suits my moves. 

2. Think in 12-Week Years

If you read this blog, you know I’m a big fan of The 12 Week Year, by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington, who present a complete paradigm shift - challenging you to redefine how you see a year. Because if calendars are historically a human construct, why can’t you define your own sense of time, too?

Twelve weeks is not a quarter of the calendar year - it is the year. The authors challenge you to forget annualised thinking and think in 12-Week Years. 

With this in mind, I set goals in 12-Week Year timeframes. However, the goal-setter in me, who has been setting annual goals diligently for over a decade, can’t help but keep doing this too. But I personally make sure I overlay my annual goals into more detailed 12-Week Year plans as well.

3. Strategise Like a Chinese Zodiac 

If you’re an amateur astrology lover like me, you’ll appreciate the packaging of this one. And if you’re not at all, it’s a concept we can all understand - theming your years. 

When I first read Mike Kim’s book You Are the Brand, I loved his idea of ‘strategising like a Chinese Zodiac’. It proposed a phased approach to your strategy, e.g. “The Year of Blogging” or “The Year of Video”. Instead of trying to do it all at once, each year you add a new focus to the line-up. You create mini systems, mastering them one by one and compounding them into something really special over time. 

Upon first starting to work for myself, I took this approach to my yearly planning. I still have my original Notes entry in my phone. I didn’t try to do everything at once.  I started with The Year of Coaching, when I first designed my program. Then I moved into the Year of Writing, the Year of Speaking and so on. I didn’t try to tick every box immediately. I embraced each theme as its time came.

4. The 10x Rule 

The 10X Rule is a challenge to think bigger in your goal setting. In his book, Grant Cardone champions redefining your ‘SMART’ goal-setting strategy from playing it safe to thinking big - really big. 

He argues that low goals create an insufficient amount of motivation and action. The lower benchmark achieves lower results. High goals, even if you don’t reach them, set the benchmark higher, and they increase the action required. Whatever the results, they will still likely be higher than had you aimed for the lower benchmark.

The 10X Rule itself is: 

• Set goals that are 10X greater than what you think you can achieve.

• Set actions that are 10X greater than what you think is required.

When I was planning my blog in its very early stages, I had momentarily considered a new blog post a month - 12 a year. After reading The 10X Rule, I immediately upgraded my goals. I published 120+ blogs that year, and have published two blogs a week for the last couple of years since starting my blog.

5. Set One Keystone Goal

You also don’t need to overcomplicate your goal-setting process. Or, if you follow any of the above formats, you may choose to revolve them around one goal.

As I shared in an earlier blog, You Only Need One Goal: How a Keystone Goal Changes Everything, a keystone goal is a single, defining goal that creates a rippling effect across your entire life. Organisational Psychologist Dr Benjamin Hardy, in Personality Isn’t Permanent, argues that it’s the only goal you need. It’s the goal that makes everything else possible.

The concept of a keystone habit was inspired by keystone species. A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large impact on an ecosystem. 

Similarly, a keystone goal has a disproportionate effect on your entire life. It either makes all the other goals irrelevant or supports them. Instead of trying to change everything, you’re choosing one goal that changes everything.

6. Tiny Experiments: An Alternative Approach to Goal Setting

As I shared in my blog, this has also been my newest approach to goal setting. 

Goal-setting isn’t without its limitations, as Anne Laure Le Cunff reminds us in Tiny Experiments. To begin with, often our goals aren’t even our own.  We borrow from our peers, celebrities and societal expectations. French philosopher René Girard called this phenomenon mimetic desire - meaning we desire something because others desire it.

Tiny Experiments presents an alternative approach to personal growth. Through a mindset of constant experimentation, the book shifts your perspective from fixed ladders to growth loops.  Goals set specific targets, while trial and error replaces a linear approach to evolving with cycles of experimentation.  

When you switch from a linear mindset to an experimental one, you focus on showing up instead of perfecting everything.

So, how do you create some structure around your personal growth if you aren’t setting goals? Make pacts.  

A pact is a commitment you make to yourself. It can be quick, like trying a new project for 10 minutes a day for 10 days. Or, it can be more in-depth, like writing 100 blogs in 100 days, as Le Cunff did.  A pact is not a habit with an unbounded time commitment, like exercise every day. A pact has a specific number of trials, is driven by curiosity and has an end date. You are learning with a lack of preconceived notions. More repetition in your pact gives you more data, but shorter pacts can often be even more effective, giving you immediate and non-intimidating insights. You just need enough trials to obtain a result you trust. 

What makes pacts so effective is that they focus on outputs, shifting the focus from outcomes to process. By prioritising process, progress is achieved through incremental experimentation.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Goal-setting isn’t about finding the perfect system. It’s about finding a way - or multiple ways of thinking that helps you move forward — whether that means thinking five moves ahead, working in 12-week sprints, choosing a yearly theme, setting bigger goals, focusing on one defining goal, or simply running a few experiments.

Borrow what works, leave what doesn’t, and change your approach as you go.