Hi Adam!

Goals are my best tool for staying motivated. I have macro goals—big things I want to accomplish—and micro goals that support those macro goals—small things that give me easy wins while making progress toward my macro goals.

For pretty much my entire life, I had never really been A Runner™. I had run before, but mostly as a social thing where I would join some friends for a run from time to time. I would also occasionally run for exercise, but that was rare.

That all changed a few years ago when a friend invited me to hop into a running group with a bunch of other friends. It was the New Year, and I was feeling that post-holiday sluggishness after eating everything in sight for the past couple months.

"Sure, why not?"

Running is hard, but it was especially hard when I first started. My body just wasn't used to it, so everything hurt. The only way to keep myself motivated was to set some goals.

My first goal was pretty easy: Run and finish a 10k race with some friends. But as that race got closer, I realized I would need to adjust this goal to keep motivated.

I knew that if my only goal was "finish a 10k", then I would lose motivation after I finished that race.

So I set a new macro goal: "Finish this same 10k race with a sub-8:00-per-mile pace." Now I had one year to improve my pace by a little more than one minute per mile.

But that's a pretty daunting macro goal, so I set some micro goals to support it:

• MACRO: 10k (6.25 miles) – Sub-8:00 pace
• Micro: 5k (3.13 miles) — Sub-7:00 pace
• Micro: 1 mile – Sub-6:00 pace
• Micro: 400m (1 lap around a track) – Sub-60 seconds

My micro goals were designed to be challenging but attainable—that way I'm motivated to keep training.

Eventually, I hit my macro goal, so I set a new one—run a 10k at a sub-7:45 pace. Then I hit that one too! So I set another new one, and kept trying to push my time down while avoiding injury and improving my micro goals as well.

I only achieved one of those micro goals—I ran a 5:53 mile before I got injured—and I almost hit my 5k goal in a race (I missed it by about 10 seconds total), but training for them directly contributed to achieving those first couple macro goals.

That’s the value of micro goals—you can win directly by achieving them, and you can win indirectly by achieving the macro goal they support.

We're about to start another new year, so now is a great time to starting thinking about next year's goals. My challenge to you this week is two-fold:

• Stop and think about your current macro goal for your career. If you have one, make sure it's achievable. If you don't have one, now is the time to set it. An example of a good career macro goal might be, "Become a people manager in the next two years".
• Once you've defined your macro goal, support it with micro goals. These goals are related to your macro goal, but much smaller in scope, and thus easier to accomplish. Using that same example, some micro goals might be, "Take a leadership training course by the end of the year” and "Find at least one junior team member to mentor this year”.

When you set your macro goal and support it with micro goals, then you can focus on smaller wins with those micro goals while still making progress toward your macro goal.

Have a great week!

Josh