It’s obvious to people and organisations that they should have goals – even stretching goals. Without goals, you can’t know where to focus. What people fail to comprehend is that their entire reality – what they see, what they do, the choices they make, everything – is filtered by their goals.

A person’s goals literally drive everything they do and are the core separating factor between humans and other species. This insight is the by-product of cutting-edge research in both positive psychology and neuroscience.

It may seem counterintuitive, but if you’re pursuing attainable goals, then your business is likely far more complex (and stagnant) than you think. If you’re pursuing attainable goals, you’re likely doing many things that are not only ineffective but damaging.

Goals enable you to filter your experience in the present and make decisions. Consequently, the goals you set have enormous implications not only in how you operate in the present but also in the direction and results you create.

If you set the wrong goal, you’ll be unable to filter the signal from the noise. Your life and business will either stagnate and stall due to complexity or you’ll scale in entirely the wrong direction.

For attainable goals, the perceptual filter is too dull to separate the signal from the noise. With such goals, you can’t filter and find the most powerful pathways forward among the near-countless options you could pursue. Frankly, attainable and linear goals justify you in maintaining not only your existing system and process but also your existing assumptions and beliefs.

Elon Musk has said: “The most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimise a thing that should not exist.”

This quotation effectively encapsulates most businesses, and it’s why most won’t and can’t scale. The majority of what most people are doing is “optimising [things] that should not exist.” Rarely is a business not only focusing on what matters and what can scale but also systematically weeding out all that “should not exist,” which can never scale.

The majority of entrepreneurs and businesses are mired in complexity and lying to themselves about what’s going on. A dear friend, a near billionaire, told me that most entrepreneurs will never scale because they don’t stop lying to themselves (much more on this later).

For a goal to be effective, it needs to be a hot knife, not only cutting cleanly through your fears and faulty assumptions but also ripping your entire business to shreds, leaving only the most relevant and scalable signal.

More than something to hit, goals are psychological and strategic tools for filtering what matters from what doesn’t. When you have a goal that’s so big it seems impossible, and a deadline so short it seems absurd, you are forced to:

1. More accurately and honestly filter everything you’re currently doing, being left to acknowledge that the majority is a distraction based on sunk cost bias or lack of accountability
2. More powerfully filter for the most innovative and teleporting pathways (and partners) you otherwise couldn’t see or find

When you commit yourself to a seemingly impossible goal – in both scale and timeline – you quickly see that almost everything in your current business (and possibly your life) is “optimising [things] that should not exist.”

Though initially humbling, this clear and honest filtering enables you to simplify and remodel what you’re doing in a far more scalable way.

In both the management and psychological literatures, ‘stretch goal’ is the common term for these types of goals, though ‘stretch goals’ have rarely been well defined. In a research article titled The Paradox of Stretch Goals: Organizations in Pursuit of the Seemingly Impossible, Duke management researcher Dr. Sim Sitkins and colleagues defined a stretch goal as “an organisational goal with an objective probability of attainment that may be unknown but is seemingly impossible given current capabilities (i.e., current practices, skills, and knowledge).”

A stretch goal, then, is a seemingly impossible goal given your current knowledge and capabilities. From this definition and for the remainder of this book, we will use ‘impossible goal’ as a replacement for ‘stretch goal’.

Sitkins further states in that article:

Pursuing goals that are seemingly impossible might stimulate exploratory learning specifically because radically new approaches are required, [and] because [impossible goals] involve extreme redefinitions of what an organization is capable of being or achieving, they can capture, shift, and refocus attention.

Dr. Siktins’s remarks highlight a few crucial insights that impact your ability to scale:

1. An impossible goal is one you don’t initially know if you can achieve, but is one you currently lack the capability to achieve in this moment

2. These types of goals involve an ‘extreme redefinition’ of what your organisation can be and achieve

3. Through this redefinition, the attention and focus of your organisation shifts to distinctive and unique paths and approaches

Impossible goals not only redefine what your organisation is and can be, but they also force you to more clearly define your organisation.

They force focus.

Most businesses are not well defined.

Most businesses are diluted, overly complex, and lack clarity.

If you’re ready to scale, then setting and pursuing a seemingly impossible goal – in both scale and timeline – is the first step. The reason an impossible goal is the first step is because only a goal of that level enables you to filter your current business and future prospects with the rigor needed to scale.

From the reference frame of an impossible goal, almost nothing will work. Therefore, such a goal serves as a razor-sharp filter for your current situation and decisions.

Extracted from The Science of Scaling: Grow Your Business Bigger and Faster Than You Think Possible by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson (£20.99, Hay House), out July 27th (available for pre-order).