SMART goals are the safety scissors of the professional world. They feel good in your hand, they make you feel like you’re doing real work, but you’re never going to cut through anything substantial with them. We’ve been lied to for decades by management consultants who wanted a neat acronym to sell to HR departments, and now we’re all obsessed with being ‘Specific’ and ‘Measurable’ while our actual impact stays flat.
It’s a trap.
The day I realized I was winning at all the wrong things
Back in 2018, I was working at a mid-sized logistics firm called Swift-Link. I was a junior operations lead, and I was obsessed with my KPIs. I set a SMART goal: “Reduce shipping documentation errors by 5% by the end of Q3 through weekly audit checks.” It was perfect. It was specific. It was measurable. It was definitely achievable. I spent three months obsessing over every comma and zip code on our manifests. I hit the goal. I actually hit 5.2%. My manager gave me a literal high-five in the breakroom near the crappy Keurig machine.
But while I was busy being ‘SMART,’ our main competitor was testing a completely different automated routing system that made documentation errors irrelevant because the system handled it all. My 5% improvement meant nothing. I had spent 90 days optimizing a horse and buggy while the guy next door was building a car. I felt like an idiot. I had followed the rules, checked the boxes, and achieved exactly what I set out to do—which turned out to be the most boring, low-impact thing possible.
Anyway, that was the catalyst. I realized that the framework itself encourages you to look down at your feet instead of at the horizon.
“Achievable” is just another word for “Safe”
The ‘A’ in SMART is the real killer. Achievable. Realistic. Attainable. These are all just polite ways of saying “don’t try too hard because you might fail and look bad on a performance review.”
When you sit down to write a goal and you have to prove it’s achievable, your brain automatically filters out anything truly transformative. You stop thinking about how to double your output and start thinking about how to increase it by 4% because 4% is defensible. It’s safe. I know people will disagree with this—especially the middle-management types who need to report steady numbers to their VPs—but I genuinely believe that if your goal doesn’t make your stomach turn a little bit when you write it down, you’re basically just making a sophisticated grocery list.
I might be wrong about this, but I think the obsession with achievability has created a generation of workers who are terrified of the ‘Big Miss.’ We’d rather hit a tiny, meaningless target than miss a massive, world-changing one.
If you hit 100% of your goals every year, you aren’t a high performer. You’re just a really good estimator of your own limitations.
A very biased rant about project management software
I refuse to use Jira. I know, I know—every tech company on the planet swears by it. But Jira, and to a lesser extent Asana, are the digital graveyards where SMART goals go to rot. They turn work into a series of tiny, bite-sized tickets that reward you for ‘closing’ things rather than ‘solving’ things. The UI looks like 2004 tax filing software and it makes me want to quit my job every time I see a notification. I tell all my friends to avoid it. Use a notebook. Use a whiteboard. Use a simple text file. Just stay away from the tools that force you to break your vision down into a thousand ‘achievable’ tasks until the original spark is completely extinguished.
My 14-month spreadsheet of failure
I actually tracked this. Over a period of 14 months, I ran an experiment on myself. I tracked 212 individual goals in a massive Excel sheet. Half of them were written using the strict SMART framework. The other half were what I called “Dumb Goals”—vague, massive, slightly terrifying ambitions like “Become the go-to person for X” or “Revolutionize how we handle Y.”
- SMART Goals: 82% completion rate. Impact on my salary or career progression? Almost zero.
- Dumb Goals: 28% completion rate. Total failure on paper.
But here’s the thing: those 28% of ‘failures’ accounted for every single promotion, every meaningful raise, and every project that actually got noticed by the executive team. One of my ‘vague’ goals led me to spend three weekends learning a specific type of SQL query that eventually saved the company $40,000 in a single month. That wasn’t in my SMART plan. It wasn’t ‘measurable’ when I started. It was just a hunch that I followed because I wasn’t constrained by a quarterly check-box.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. The SMART framework assumes you already know what the solution is. But in any job that actually matters, you usually don’t know the solution when you start. You have to find it through a messy process of trial and error.
Stop being so specific
Being specific is great for building a bridge or baking a cake. It’s terrible for innovation. When you’re too specific too early, you lock yourself into a path. You lose the ability to pivot when you see a better opportunity.
I’ve seen people ignore massive market shifts because “that’s not what we put in the Q1 goals.” It’s insane. We’ve prioritized the framework over the reality of the work. If you want high-impact wins, you need to leave room for the unexpected. You need to be okay with a goal that looks a bit blurry at the edges.
Total lie that we need everything mapped out to the millimeter.
I don’t have a five-step plan for you. I don’t have a new acronym to replace the old one. I just think we should all be a little more comfortable with being ‘unrealistic.’ I still catch myself trying to make my goals ‘achievable’ because I’m human and I don’t like failing. It’s a hard habit to break.
But next time you’re writing down what you want to do this year, maybe try deleting the ‘A’ and the ‘R’ and see what happens. Does it scare you? Good. That’s probably the only thing worth doing.
Just try being unreasonable for once. See what happens.