Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Target SMART Objectives

You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.

➤ Yogi Berra

To get where you want to be—to learn and grow in your career and personal life—you’ll need to set some goals. But goals by themselves aren’t enough to guarantee your success.

Goals are great things, and you may have many of them: lose weight, find a better job, move to a bigger house (or a smaller one), write that novel, learn to play the electric guitar, write a killer Rails application, or learn all about Erlang.

But many goals never get past that stage—the lofty, generalized “I want to be better at xyz.” Weight loss is a prime example. Most people would like to be trimmer and fitter (especially those of us ...