Big, hairy audacious goals also sound like hopeful bullshit, especially when proposed as:

Change the world. Help people live better lives. Do stuff that matters. Make things people care about.

At best, they are a marketing ploy. At worst, they are a scam. In reality, they fall somewhere in between. It’s mock, or imitation motivation. Big, hairy audacious goals provide a glimpse — just from their description — of a possible, but never measurable big picture. It’s that grandiose thing you’re working towards, but rarely hit. An imaginable prize. They are for the dreamers.

Ironically, these motivation techniques hide the reality of accomplishing a goal. Reality is a painful process. A process requires patience — the patience of enduring the drudge of repetition, practice, deadlines and adversaries. Audacious goals cloak the existence of this process.

The opposite of setting audacious goals would be living and strategizing in stark reality. Realists, rather than dreamers, are inventive — not emotional like the dreamers. Realists are grounded and anticipatory of the process. They avoid audacious goal setting, because audacious goal setting softens any chance of accomplishment.

Realistic, grounded goals also lack excitement and artistic vision, missing the opportunity to motivate yourself or an organization beyond short-term accomplishment, especially when proposed as:

Write one song per day for the next week. Increase sales by 10% with more advertising. Donate $20 per month to a child in Ghana.

The reality and dream spectrum should be balanced, rather than abided to one way or another. The drudgery of reality should be alleviated by a sense of some bigger, more audacious goal. And, the visionary goal setting should be balanced by a clear idea of process — the painful, tedious, less exciting steps in getting there.

Alfred Hitchcock is an example of an artist who reached for emotional, audacious goals while conscious of the drudgery of moving towards them. He was aware that the backbone of his art — stories — had their limits in reality, while still visualizing the bigger, emotional impacts of creating a film. He was anticipatory of the pain, or lack of fun, that resulted in accomplishing even a portion of the audacious goal.

“A story is simply a motif, just as a painter might paint a bowl of fruit just to give him something to be painting. Once the screenplay is finished, I’d just as soon not make the film at all. All the fun is over. I have a strongly visual mind. I visualize a picture right down to the final cuts. I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and then I don’t look at the script while I’m shooting. I know it off by heart, just as an orchestra conductor needs not look at the score. It’s melancholy to shoot a picture. When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 per cent of your original conception.”

The realist sees only the drudgery, often not looking beyond it. The dreamer can see only the prize. Dreamers don’t think their ideas all the way through, relying on chance and the acceptance of petty mistakes. Realists consider only process, eliminating flow, natural reaction and instinct. Goal setting requires discipline — both audacious goals and an expectation of the gritty process — rather than just grasping today’s reality or reaching for some distant fantasy.

The concept is popular because its applicability throughout the business food chain is all-encompassing:

Will the starters — the entrepreneurs — be successful with a glorious win or a rough, constructive failure under their belt? Do you hire a previous employee of a failed empire, or do you recruit one that rode the wave to an IPO? Do you invest in the team that has failed marketing a few previous, but promising ideas or that has already built and sold a product?

The answers to these questions might seem obvious, even trite. Of course, you would bet on the previous success! But recent research could sway you to answer differently.

Bob Sutton, in an article in the Harvard Business Review, summarized one particularly compelling study

Shmuel Ellis and his colleagues have really dug into this issue [of learning from failure] with, first, a field experiment with two companies of soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces, who were tested for their performance on navigation exercises. The critical difference between the two groups was that — following standard practice in the Israeli military — the first company had a series of after event reviews during four days of navigation exercises that focused only on the mistakes that soldiers made, and how to correct them. The second company, in its after event discussions, focused on what could be learned from both their successes and failures.

Then, two months later, these same two companies went through two days of navigation exercises. The results showed that, although substantial learning occurred in both groups:

Soldiers who discussed both successes and failures learned at higher rates than soldiers who discussed just failures.

Soldiers in the group that discussed both successes and failures appeared to learn faster because they developed “richer mental models” of their experiences than soldiers who only discussed failures.

One of the more interesting arguments in this realm would be to determine if the startup and founder ecosystem is engineered like evolution: Does Darwinism apply to early-stage companies and their founders? Does success actually breed more success?

I would define the success of a startup, first and foremost, as the construction of a sustainable, profitable business, followed by M&A transactions and liquidity events. Based on the typical longevity of these events, they must favor success by default. But, what about on a shorter¹ time-span? Do only the strong survive, or is the two-time failed entrepreneur more likely to have a third success over the two-time successful entrepreneur? I don’t have the data or the experience to answer this question, but it’s healthy to wonder how and why a previous experience, if any at all, matters.

My opinion is that we shouldn’t see failure as an excuse for not succeeding. That’s where I see the “failure is good!” research conditioning irrational behavior, which can be detrimental to entrepreneurs. Failure has certainly done more good than bad. Consider the Edsel, Newton or the Bob, all seemingly failures with positive, long-lasting outcomes. But, what about the failure of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and AIG? Have these atrocious events provided financial reform or simply conditioned the banks into believing it’s okay to fail at the financial expense of others?

Failure shouldn’t be celebrated or feared. If necessary, it should be reflected on, but never encouraged. Ultimately, the reward of failure is some experience. The reward of success is some experience and, that one thing that really matters, a successful outcome.

Failure is overrated. Failing is a hell of a lot easier than succeeding. The only thing you need to do to fail is nothing. I’m not arguing that anyone supporting failure as a learning mechanism has done nothing, but part of me believes failure is widely encouraged because the majority of the people preaching are trying to feel better for failing themselves.

The “failure is good!” mantra falls into the same trap that many other claims in entrepreneurship-world fall into: they are supported by a culture of echos rather than hard facts and data.

1. I realize this isn’t a perfect analogy to evolution because studying evolution requires analyzing a long time-spans.

At one point in my life, I would have told you Allen Iverson was my role model. While I still respect him for certain accomplishments, a turning point of maturity forced me to realign what a role model was and who was worth having as one.

At the close of adolescence, my role models became within reach. These role models, only an email away, included those doing a more professional, lucrative transformation of what I was doing or wanted to be doing in business.

After a period of time, I realized my role models and I were on the same track, just a few laps ahead. I wondered if I could just run a little faster…

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What happens when role models become peers?

You could seek new role models. There is something intriguing about constantly admiring someone so out of reach that the opportunity of rubbing shoulders is unlikely. The fairytale distance can be seductive and equally motivational in reaching big, ambitious goals. Within the same argument, others might claim that if a role model can realistically become a peer, you aren’t reaching high enough. Who wants to join the club that will accept them as a member, anyway?

You could remain a disciple to your role model, making him feel comfortably superior. While from an outsider’s perspective it may seem that you’ve reached an intellectual limit, there may be more to gain by appearing less aggressive than him. If you aren’t explicitly running ahead of the role model, his guard is down. The dilemma is that without a power strategy, there is a ceiling. With awareness and manipulation of the superiority complex, you are still controlling the chess board.

Finally, you could ignore the level playing field and approach the situation with your arms swinging. Maybe this is what we’re all fighting for: to box in the same ring as our idols. Fuck making friends, just stiff arm them to the end zone.

I had just gotten off of the phone with the seasoned CEO and founder of a startup I was doing a gig for a little less than a year ago. I loved what the company was attempting to accomplish, but I believed the legal fees necessary to scale the company would absorb their cash reserves before a marketable product was ready to ship. The ecstatic screaming about the income statement was in response to my worrisome, while less experienced, remarks about their business model.

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The CEO was analyzing the accounting documents of public companies with similar business models and infrastructure. He realized, and I would also eventually, that just because the legal fees had the potential to barricade the company’s goal and marketability in the short run, it didn’t mean they couldn’t generate revenue concurrently by bootstrapping what they did have, rather than what they planned to have in the future.

It’s important to consider that businesses often appear as if they generate one revenue stream, but actually generate numerous, concurrent revenue streams behind the public eye. For example, UPS isn’t just a shipping company and Amazon isn’t just a retailer. Some of these unique practices are so obscure you’d never know the company was profiting from them unless you looked at their financial statements.

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When the phone call winded down, the CEO spit out a few examples from the complimentary companies he was analyzing. I remember the example he provided dealt with one of the few successful music startups at the time. The company was not only providing a consumer subscription service, but behind the scenes was licensing music to other platforms, selling ring tones and even providing anonymous user data to advertisers.

Consider these two models of concurrent revenue streams:

1. Moby has the best selling electronica album of all time, Play. While the album dominated the charts for a few years, Moby found success by commercializing his creativity to less obvious (at least in 1999) markets: licensing. According to Wired, the tracks on Play have been “sold hundreds of times for commercials, movies, and TV shows – a licensing venture so staggeringly lucrative that the album was a financial success months before it reached its multi-platinum sales total.” Listen to the album. Even if you’ve never heard of Moby, you will probably recognize a handful of tracks just from being alive during its prominence.

2. Google is now hiring bond traders. While most major corporations utilize financial analysts to hedge foreign cash flows, it’s rumored Google may be using their vast data sets to build and run a hedge fund. Legalities aside, they have the valuable data to pull it off, as would a company like Facebook

These are examples of concurrent engineering applied to sales and marketing. It’s similar to flipping the stick, except you aren’t flipping anything; you’re just being resourceful with your stick. Moby is a musician, but he’s also a brand and advertiser. Google is a search engine, but they are also a hedge fund and hundreds of other things.

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Since the original phone call, I’ve dispersed the concurrent engineering advice to not only my own company, but to numerous artists, musicians and brands. Just because the thing you eventually want to sell isn’t ready, it doesn’t mean what you do have, right now, isn’t marketable.

I remember reading the story about Mark Zuckerberg and the “creation” of the respective Facebook communities.

A manager asked him “how do I create communities for my business like the ones that exist on Facebook?”

Mark responded in his typical manner that “you can’t.”

His point was that communities already exist in society–Facebook simply gave them a place to easily organize.

On the same note, Twitter is popular because as a society we’ve embraced the usability of such a tool. If society didn’t want it, then it would be gone already. That’s not to say it will last–it may not. But at the moment, we’ve adapted to a product because it filled an existent desire.

Society inevitably gets what it wants. As an entrepreneur, your goal shouldn’t be to reinvent the wheel. It should be to provide elegant organization for a longing that already exists in people’s desires.