Every January, individuals around the world set out to take on the challenge of completing their New Year resolutions. And by the end of the year, more than 90% of those people have failed to fulfill their year-long goals. But why do we keep failing our goals, year after year?

This past summer during the Business Immersion Program, I along with 24 other interns had the opportunity to work with Sam Stewart ‘19, co-founder of Red Roots Capital. Stewart’s focus during his time with us was to better equip the 25 of us with the skills we would need to ensure that we could set quality goals that would be achievable within a given time.

Stewart started the session by establishing baseline facts that helped contextualize why so many people end up falling short of their goals. For instance, having an accountability partner to check in with on your goal progression immensely increases the chances of a goal’s success. Similarly, keeping track of your progress through metrics is also key to fulfilling your goals.

We then conducted an interesting exercise, in which we all walked throughout Crawfordsville or Wabash, creating a list of 20-25 goals that they wanted to achieve. Wrapping my head around all of the different ways I want to improve myself proved challenging, but in the end, I had a list of 20 valuable goals.

Stewart then had us narrow down this list of goals to 5 important overarching goals and then showed us a good framework by which to achieve them. We started by writing a description of the goal, followed by 3 different levels of emotional reasoning as to why we wanted to achieve these 5 things. Then, we noted Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which would help us track our progress as well as micro goals to show us our progress towards the overarching goal.

This structure gave us a good starting point by which we would be able to set important goals and begin to actually achieve them. And while we focused primarily on how to set the goals to be successful, Stewart did have some advice for how to go about achieving them.“Don’t focus your time on being consistently great, focus on being consistently good,” said Stewart.

This session left me and my fellow interns feeling better equipped to set quality goals, and to be confident in our ability to try and complete them. Stewart’s knowledge of personal goals was an invaluable addition to the Business Immersion Program’s lineup of impressive professionals.