Hard Goals: The Secret to Getting from Where You Are to Where You want to Be

Want to increase sales? Get promoted? Change the world? There’s a goal for that . . .

Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, the school teacher next door who amassed a million-dollar fortune . . . Did these people succeed because they were more motivated or because they were more disciplined? The answer to both questions is yes—but not in the ways you might think. Anyone can achieve extraordinary things. The secret is setting goals that test the very limits of your abilities.

In Hard Goals, Mark Murphy, the acclaimed author of Hundred Percenters, explains the science behind getting from where you are to where you want to be in your career, business, and life.

Leadership IQ, Murphy’s top-rated leadership training consultancy, studied nearly 5,000 workers from virtually every field and found that extraordinary goals—the kind that got America to the moon and back, developed the iPod, created nanotechnology, and helped individuals overcome tremendous personal adversity—stimulate and engage the brain in ways that are profoundly different from the goals most people set.

Research conducted for this book revealed that people who set Hard goals are up to 75 percent more fulfilled than people with easy goals. In these pages, Mark Murphy explains how success, and the satisfaction it brings, comes from knowing how to set goals that are:

• Heartfelt—have an emotional attachment, “scratch an existential itch.”
• Animated—motivated by a vision, that movie that plays over and over in your mind.
• Required—imbued with such a sense of urgency that you have no other choice but to start acting on them right here, right now.
• Difficult—the greatest achievements come from the toughest challenges—but they also leave you feeling stronger, smarter, and more fulfilled.

People set goals all the time, but the majority end up unfulfilled or abandoned. With all the challenges facing us today, we could use a little more achievement. Hard Goals can help us get there by offering the hard science and practical techniques to conquer procrastination and unlock your brain’s potential for realizing your goals.

About the Author

Mark Murphy is founder and CEO of Leadership IQ, a top-rated provider of leadership training for Microsoft, IBM, MasterCard, Merck, and other companies. He is the author of Hundred Percenters and has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Washington Post, and other publications.