Action Goals: What Guitar Lessons Have Taught Me About Goal-Setting At Work

I bought my first serious guitar in 2017. After about a year of dabbling with guitar on my own, learning chords and songs from YouTube lessons and other paid courses online, I started guitar lessons with a guitar instructor.

Since then, and especially with my latest guitar instructor, I have picked up and honed a lot of behavioural traits and techniques that help me in other walks of life. In fact, I often find myself quoting examples from my guitar lessons to my coworkers, friends and family whenever they come to me for advice.

One of those things that have stuck to me is this:

Learning any craft is a journey, not a destination.

Multiple wise folks throughout history

After much thought and deliberation, when I bought my first guitar, I resolved to give myself four years to guitar to get somewhere good. The problem with that?

Well, at the beginning, I wanted to be able to play my favourite songs. About a year in, I wanted to play with others. Around two or three years later, I wanted to write some songs and potentially release them – even if it was just a friends and family release.

The more I learned about guitar, the more I realised what I knew about music and what I didn’t. I learned more about different kinds of music. I learned what kinds of sounds impacted me, and what didn’t. My goalposts kept moving.

There was another problem with this. Having very defined goals, in terms that the world defined for me, always made me compare myself to other people. I cannot but laugh at my naivety when I was mentally calculating how much time my favourite musician had spent perfecting his guitar and music skills. I calculated it to be about 20 years, and I used that as my goal: that I’ll continue to play guitar for 20 years to be able to get to where I wanted to be. Which was a very roundabout way of saying: I want to be able to play like him when I get there.

I think that goal-setting in our work life also suffers from these symptoms.

Most driven people I know, including me, are constantly trying to map their career growth goals by quarters and years. The chase for the next big promotion and the periodic performance reviews that enable this make us feel compelled to have clear, defined and time-bound outcomes linked to our jobs, our title, our salary, and so on.

But the challenge? Our career growth goals are not as tightly linked to our skill levels and results as much as one would have wanted. You might have grown incredibly well as a marketer, and yet, lack of budgets or headcount would mean you don’t get that promotion. You might have become an incredibly skilled engineer in a new technology, but the company decides to sunset that product and you may be out of a job even.

Having moved from one grade to another every year in school and university, we are unable to deal with the lack of ‘demonstrable’ success in our work life.

So what worked in my music lessons that I now apply to my career?

Well, for me, what has worked is setting action goals, and not outcomes. Similar to an OKR exercise in tech companies, I also start with some objectives, how will I measure if I am successful in that objective, and what actions I want to continue doing in order to fulfil that objective.

I have realised that when I do this, I am able to focus on doing my action goals without worrying about how fast or slow I am going. Another advantage of these action goals and habits is the seeing the power of compounding. Every incremental progress has a way of adding up over time that is simply magical to see over time.

Do I not worry about my objectives though? How do I make sure I am on track to hit my objective?

If you recall, I said that I also have some way to ‘measure’ if I am successful in my objective. For some goals like learning songs, I record myself every now and then and see how I am progressing. For other goals like picking up a technique to play faster, I will record the speed at which I am able to play a particular lick.

Doesn’t this sound an awful lot like performance reviews then?

Well, for me, there are two main differences.

1. I don’t have any expectations of a prize if I am on track or have achieved my goal. Contrast this with our periodic performance reviews where our compensation, promotion, etc. are all decided by what we (and our managers and stakeholders) feel about our work. For me, the prize is in completing my action goals over time.
2. I use the ‘measurement’ to only understand if and how I need to tweak my action goals to reach my intended objective. If I am progressing faster on a particular track, I can dial down the time I spend on that track while increasing the time I spend on another more challenging track.
   

So how do I use this same philosophy in my work? We don’t often have as much control on how our companies set goals for us, how they measure our work performance, and how act based on our performance reviews. Yet, I have found a few ways to add more purpose, enjoyment, and indeed, sanity to my work life.

1. Strive for goals, but find your enjoyment in your craft: While I will still have my career goals, I have increasingly focused on identifying what parts of my job am I enjoying, and how I can improve in that. My hypothesis is that by doing more of what I love and I am good at, I will have greater impact for my company as long as the company still values that work or the project I am staffed on. This only increases my chances of getting better promotions, salary appraisals, and so on when the semi-annual or annual performance reviews come along.
2. Actively participate in your own goal-setting: I try to have an active dialogue with my manager on my goals. At my current company, we do this every six months in a more formal HR process, but I end up having this conversation with my manager at least every month. Am I still chasing the right metrics to reach my goals? How am I performing in these? How should we tweak my goals, actions and metrics depending on my performance, evolving career interests, and business goals.
3. Forget comparisons, except perhaps learn a thing or two from them: This can sometimes be the hardest to be aware of, but a lot of our consternation in not-so-great performance reviews can come from us comparing (or being compared) to our teammates, peers and mentors. If I were to do this for my guitar learning journey, I would be convinced in a matter of minutes that there is no point trying to learn guitar because there will always be a better player than you. The funny thing is that every musician or sportsperson or literally any craftsperson can say the same thing – even if they might have won the best award in their field multiple times. If my guitar heroes actively avoid comparison even if they can come out on top so often, I am doing my ego no favours if I use peer comparisons as a source into my goal-setting or performance reviews. But I do use my teammates, peers and mentors as a source of inspiration to identify what new actions I can add to my repertoire that will help me reach my goals (perhaps faster).

What do you think about this? Do you also find that you derive lots of life and work lessons from your non-work pursuits too?