All our lives, we are told to be SMART.
The SMART kid at school and the SMART Employee at work. Who likes to be DUMB anyway!
And for all SMART people, New Year is a reminder to set SMART goals – personal and professional.
I was introduced to personal development and setting professional goals when I began my professional journey. With professional goals inevitably came the concept of SMART Goals. But all these years, being SMART, or I should rather say setting SMART goals, hasn’t always helped. So, I am here today advocating about being DUMB and setting DUMB Goals.
A quick recap, SMART goals stand for:
   Specific
   Measurable
   Attainable
   Relevant
   Time-specific
SMART Goals have their benefits:
1. If you don’t know where you are going, you will never get there! Specific goals address this dilemma. The more SPECIFIC a goal is, the better it is.
2. If you don’t know how to measure your success, how will you know you have succeeded? Measurable goals let you know you have succeeded.
3. If you know your goal is attainable, you will be motivated to work towards it.
4. If your goal is not relevant to you, you would end up wasting time and effort for nothing!
5. You cannot keep working on something forever! You should know when you are going to accomplish the goal.
If SMART Goals are beneficial, they can be crippling sometimes. Not everything in life can be specific, measurable and time-bound.
What about the dreams and things you want to do but have no clue how and when? I have a long list of such things. The goal of writing 31 posts and running a 50km are examples.
DUMB is an acronym for:
   Dream-Driven
   Uplifting
   Method-Friendly
   Behaviour-Driven
DUMB Goals give you a chance to:
1. Dream and aim for things hovering too high that you don’t even attempt for fear of failure.
2. Induce an uplifting feeling when you already think about achieving them.
3. Develop a method around the madness of dreaming. These enable you to move towards your goals. Learning a new skill could be an example.
4. Practices and methods culminate into behavioural triggers that remind you to chase your goals. Eventually, the new skill you want to learn becomes a behaviour.
Does having DUMB goals make you DUMB?
The answer lies in Elon Musk’s dream of landing a man on Mars. You can feel the positivity when he talks about it and the methods enabling him to move towards his dream. His behaviours revolve around making the dream a reality for himself and the greater good of humanity. Is Elon Musk dumb? He is one of the sought-after personalities of the 21st century.
If SMART and DUMB goals have their advantages, the question then arises - when to use which approach?
Well, I am a dreamer. So, I would start with DUMB goals to visualize my success. I have already visualized successfully publishing 31 posts by March and running a 50km this year. Going to the next level, I have also imagined what I am going to do when I achieve them 😊
The next task is to break them into SMART goals. Writing this post was my goal for 1st January, and my practice run for 2nd January.Â
SMART is an excellent goal-setting approach. But just like not one size fits all, it may not be the best approach for all your goals. Try to be DUMB and give yourself a chance to enjoy the thrill of DUMB Goals.
This is a very nice post. Infact the so called SMART goals have created a large pool of robots. DUMB goals shall help us all reinvent ourselves. I can vouch for myself that the moments I have enjoyed in life are those when I have been DUMB. Thanks once again for posting this piece.
Rajesh
Nikita I like this one. SMART goals are always external driven and sometime forced by company, society or in general. DUMB goals are internal driven...things which we want to do and things which will shape our personality.