Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done pdfdrive com

What if You Can’t Cut It in Half?

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What if you have to pay down $50,000 in credit card debt? What if that’s your
goal and the thought of cutting that number in half and only paying $25,000
makes you want to throw up a little? Or a lot.
Some goals are difficult to cut in half. For those, don’t cut them in half; give
yourself more time. If you doubled the amount of time you gave yourself to pay
off the debt, what’s the worst thing that would happen? You’d pay a little more
in interest but you’d still pay off the whole debt. Remember, we’re up against
quitting. The options we’re talking about right now aren’t: 1. Finish perfectly, or
2. Cut the goal in half. Those aren’t the choices we’re debating. The options are:
1. Quit the goal because it was too big, or 2. Cut it in half and finish it.
I’m trying to keep you out of the 92 percent who fail.
And if that means extending your timeline, then you should.
Those two approaches, cutting the goal in half or doubling the timeline, can
be applied to most goals.
Obviously, if your goal is to take medicine or something lifesaving, by all
means do not cut that in half. Or if it’s to not punch coworkers in the face, don’t
start punching half as many as you desire. If you’re training for a race and have a
very regimented training plan, respect that. A race plan doesn’t fit into this idea,
because your measured plan created by an expert already prevents you from
having a goal that is too big.
How Does the Half-Off Rule Impact Work Goals?
If you have some goals at work that your boss gave you, there’s a chance the
“cut your goal in half” idea won’t work. It’s unrealistic to think that you have the
power to just cut all your annual goals in half. I agree. But when it comes to
corporate goals you don’t have control over, the research suggesting that reduced
goals perform better over the long run gives you ammunition to set the right goal
in the first place.
I once worked at a company that took twenty years to make a $5 million
annual revenue on the back of one great product. The CEO decided one year that
the company’s new goal was to make another $5 million in five years on a
brand-new, untested product. Everyone smiled when she announced this
aggressive new initiative in the boardroom, but the break room tends to tell the
truth about a company.

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Everyone knew it was impossible—not just out of reach, but irresponsible in
its overreach. It would demand resources, distract us from our real goals, and
ultimately fizzle out with a whimper. That’s exactly what happened. After a
frustrating year, the goal was tweaked, changed, and eventually abandoned.
Few things demoralize a workforce like a leader who doesn’t pick the right-
sized goal. If you think it’s discouraging to break a promise to yourself, imagine
multiplying that discouragement by a hundred or even a thousand employees.
How do you apply the 50 percent rule to work goals? By making sure
they’re the right size from the beginning. How do you do that though? That’s
what the rest of the book is about, but chapter 7 in particular will be important
for work goals. Pulling data from the past will inform the planning of goals in
the future. The bottom line in corporate settings is that even if you can’t cut a
goal in half, you can help temper dangerous optimism and planning fallacy in
your company.