How Unbreakable Promises Help Your Team Achieve Unrealistic Goals

Read Time: 3 minutes 17 seconds

I'm both inspired by goals and skeptical of them.

On the one hand, they are born of our imagination. We envision a world that does not yet exist and conspire to make it come true.

On the other hand, they are the product of compromise. We collaborate to find common ground and neutralize the inspiration.

We overestimate how much we can do and how clearly we see the future. And we underestimate our control over the outcome and how resilient our resolve will prove when adversity arrives.

As a result, we're better at missing goals than meeting them.

By contrast, promises are our word. They are a commitment to our best selves. They are contracts that we write with the expectation they'll hold up in the court of our self-worth.

When we talk about integrity, this is what we mean.

And yet most leaders I work with have donated years of their lives to set goals they won't hit, and never once a few minutes to write the promises they won't break.

Let's change that.

Inspiration

I'm not sure if this phenomenon has a name, but I love it when something I did intuitively is done better by someone else. It helps bring a new level of clarity to my thinking.

That's what happened when Matthew Rechs published this thread:

I saw it when it deservedly went viral and had two reflections:

1. This is a practice I had done loosely and privately, but he tightened it up and made it public. Smart!

2. These are not the promises that I would make.

That's no shade on Mr. Rechs. Taking a spiky point of view is precisely the point.

As we discussed in both the Magnetic Culture and Professional Competitive Advantage playbooks, if you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.

So instead of debating his promises, I wrote my own: