How Many Goals Should I Set at Once?

Hi Garrett, how many goals should I set at once? Hi Cadre listener. Thank you for that great question. Let me say into the mic so you can hear me clearly one at a time. That could seriously be the whole video for you all. Now. It is that straightforward. It can be that simple. But if you want to stick around to figure out why that is, then I got you. Anytime you're thinking about a goal, we often think about too many at once. What we really want to do is find a single priority, because when we think about too many goals that we're chasing simultaneously, it almost always leads to a lower likelihood of success.

Do you want to learn a new language? Read more? Start to meditate? Have a fitness goal? All great goals to have. What I would tell you is circle one as your priority area and then put a hold on the others. Not saying you're not going to accomplish it one day, but figure out your number one priority. When you're trying to find that priority goal, there's a few questions that you want to ask because it's kind of a hard process. You want to think about what is most important to me out of these areas that I'm considering, what will give me the most progress in life in this topic or area, and overall, what's most important is what will give me the most fulfillment and satisfaction if I ended up achieving this goal.

Now disclaimer this doesn't mean that you just disregard every other areas of your life. If you're a parent, that doesn't mean you just don't feed your children, because that's not my goal right now. You still want to do your basic needs for the rest of your life and have those things as a general focus. But if you want to increase your likelihood of success on a given goal, which is really the whole point of goal setting and goal pursuit, then you need to choose one single priority and go ahead and attack.

And it overall, it's simple enough. Would you rather have on one hand, setting five goals simultaneously where you feel overwhelmed, you feel super stressed and anxious and frustrated about progress, and if you're lucky, you might hit one of them, but you don't know how to set the goals effectively and take the time. You don't know how to pursue the goals, and you don't know how to monitor progress on all five goals. Just saying that sounds kind of overwhelming already. Or on the other hand, would you have one goal, one priority area that you would love to achieve, and then you just go out and absolutely crush it with all of your focus and all of your resources allocated towards that priority area.

If you're curious about the science behind this and how our brain works and why this works by setting a priority area, here are two episodes right here by Andrew Huberman. He's a neuroscientist, and he talks about the science of how essentially our brain is incapable of multitasking, which some of you may already know. So it's more effective to set one priority area. Set your energy and resources towards it, and like I said earlier, it simply increases your probability of success. So go out there, choose the priority area that you want to adjust.

Find a goal that is suitable for that area, prioritize it, and once you accomplish it, which you'll have a higher likelihood of doing, so after you do it, you have the skills and the confidence necessary to either add a challenge to that topic or area of priority, or you can go back to that list of goals that you want to accomplish, find the next priority area, circle it, and repeat.