Goal setting is a basic step in developing your marketing strategy – you need to know what you’re aiming to achieve in order to determine how you’re going to get there. The problem is, your business goals rest squarely in the future. External factors often determine your goals: your leisure activities that require financing, your mortgage that needs to be paid, your kids that need to be put through college… With all that, the value of your conducting your business itself recedes into the background.
There is a way. In reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience* I rediscovered the value of intrinsic goals. Goals as described above are extrinsic: you pay attention to the future benefits of your work and to the consequences of your actions (not a bad thing per se but bear with me). By contrast, intrinsic goals reside in the activity itself – you do it because the doing itself is the reward. Consider the conduct of sustainable business an end in itself and you’ll achieve its intrinsic goals.
In business, you tend to focus on the future and how your current actions will get you where you want to be. Intrinsic goals inject value to the current action itself and in achieving them you pay attention to the here-and-now. Intrinsic goals allow you to gain control over the present moment and enjoy doing what you’re doing. According to Csikszentmihalyi, “[w]hen experience is intrinsically rewarding, life is justified in the present, instead of being held hostage to a hypothetical future gain.”
Sustainable marketing pays attention to both extrinsic and intrinsic goals. What’s more, the achievement of your intrinsic goals will help you achieve the extrinsic ones and allow you to enjoy the journey itself. How can you go wrong?
As you take one last look at your business goals for the next year and as you finalize your new year’s resolutions, resolve to enjoy doing sustainable business for its own sake.
Have a successful and enjoyable 2010!
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* Though I’m not going to review Flow on this blog, I highly recommend it.
Image credit: scottwills
