Setting SMART Goals
As you’ve probably already determined, reaching your poker goals is going to take a lot of steps, some small and some big. In order to keep momentum on your side, it is key that you use effective goal setting strategies from the outset. Research shows that effective goals tend to be specific, short term, and challenging. Conveniently, there is an acronym used to help remind us of the traits that all effective goals share: SMART.
You might have already heard of SMART goals, but if you haven’t, or if you’d like a refresher, here’s a brief summary on how to come up with maximally effective goals. Later, we’ll look at objectives and outcomes.
Making Your Goals Specific
If you’re looking for your goals to be the pathway to success, to guide you to where you want to be, then they must be clear and well-defined. The nebulous desire to be a great poker player isn’t a terribly specific goal. What exactly is a great poker player? Is it making a certain amount of money? Winning a certain event or title? Taking the most creative lines to maximize EV? Reading all the poker books ever written and being able to quote them from memory? Each player probably has a different idea of what being a successful poker player means to them – which is totally fine. To make our system work for you, though, you need to come up with clear goals. The more clear and specific your goals are, the easier it will be for you to know when you have achieved them. You should also use this as a opportunity to think about the outcomes, i.e. what you want to be able to do or where you want to be at the end of the project.
Making Your Goals Measurable
Once you have come up with a clear goal, it is time to think about how you will measure it. You want to have a tangible method for tracking and measuring your progress. Whatever it is you want to work on, make sure that it’s obvious when you have achieved your goal. If you’re working on a big project then you should set some milestones by thinking about the specific tasks you need to accomplish along the way.
Making Your Goals Attainable
Attainable goals consist of actions that you can and will do. To do this, you have to be realistic about the amount of time, money, effort and resources you are willing to give it because this is often a sticking point of many goals. Maybe you don’t have eight hours a day available to study. If this is the case, then having a goal of studying eight hours a day is not attainable for you. Similarly, if you want to use a postflop solver to analyze your responses to a c-bet out of position, but you’re not very tech savvy and/or haven’t learned how to use a solver before, your goal is unattainable right now. That’s not to say that you can’t do that in the future, but you will need to look at the steps to take before then to get you to where you want to be. You may also need to scale your goal down in order to make it into something that you can achieve or even re-prioritize different parts of your life, e.g. spending less time playing video games or perusing social media to make extra time for study.
Making Your Goals Relevant
SMART goals are relevant in that you want to be working towards things that are going to matter to your success. Relevant goals are ones that are important to your progress. You want to make sure that you are pursuing goals that will make a difference so that you use your time most efficiently. Why do you really want to reach this goal? Again, you can think about the outcomes of the goal(s) and make sure your goals will allow you to achieve them.
Making Your Goals Time-bound
It is super important to make sure that you set your goals with clear time frames for their achievement, otherwise it is easy for time to slip by without anything important being accomplished. Time is truly our most limited resource, so we need to use every tool at our disposal to stop contemplating and start acting. As it turns out, having a clear deadline is an excellent tool. Make sure you keep the timeline realistic and a bit flexible, in case life gets in the way.
It’s important to remember that effective goals must meet all the criteria outlined above. If some aspect of the SMART system is left out, then you can expect to run into difficulties. Make all of your goals specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound and you will be several steps ahead of your competition.
What are Objectives?
A goal focuses on the long-term outcomes you want or need to achieve, which can then be broken down into bite-sized tasks or objectives. A well-written objective is vital because it can detail every step of your learning project. When you write a specific objective, you’ll know exactly what you’re working on and what you’re working towards. The terms goal and objective are often interchangeable, but it’s important to make the distinction in order to give you a better shot at achieving your goals.
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