Taking control of where your life and career go can be a nebulous and unwieldy endeavor, especially when it’s not done strategically and with considered intent. That’s where the practice of setting long-term goals can play an important role in furthering your career and personal development.
If you’re looking to take your next big step—or have a lofty dream goal that feels out of reach—here’s a closer look at what long-term goals are and how to approach goal setting.
What is a long-term goal?
A long-term goal is an objective you set to achieve in the future for the betterment of your professional or personal life, whether it be working toward getting a particular promotion, opening a brick-and-mortar storefront, going back to school to switch careers, writing a book, or becoming proficient at playing guitar. A long-term goal usually takes at least a year to accomplish and requires smaller incremental goals in order to achieve it.
Long-term goals can benefit your personal and professional life and contribute to your overall happiness, confidence, and well-being. They can help you avoid burnout by keeping you engaged and focused on something new. Setting long-term goals forces you to step back and identify what you want from your work and personal life, which can help give you clarity and purpose and lead to better work satisfaction and a more fulfilling life.
How to set and meet long-term goals
- Identify your objective
- Make sure your goal is SMART
- Incorporate some short-term goals
- Create a plan to track progress
- Be flexible
Setting long-term personal and professional goals can be a daunting task, but there are concrete steps that you can take to strategize a plan and turn your dreams into attainable objectives. Here are five tips for setting and meeting your long-term goal:
1. Identify your objective
The first step in setting a long-term goal is identifying the objective you want to achieve, skill or talent you want to develop, or place you want to go. Take some time to assess your values—what do you really care about?—and visualize what your ideal life could look like. For example, you might think of yourself as a citizen of the world who values intercultural exchange, so you might set a goal to live abroad for two years.
2. Make sure your goal is SMART
SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Specificity is particularly important: What needs to be accomplished? Be clear and make it actionable. Setting amorphous goals is a good way to set yourself up for failure.
As you set your goal, think about how you’re going to quantify it. What’s your measure of success? Now be honest with yourself: Are you setting realistic goals? Make sure the goal you’re setting is relevant to your values in life. Finally, give yourself a clear and reasonable deadline. Don’t rush your goal, but having a clear deadline is a good way to stay motivated, and you can use a quarterly calendar to stay on track.
3. Incorporate some short-term goals
Set short-term goals as a means to an end—to be able to track your progress, divide it into more attainable chunks, and know when you’ve hit your main goal.
It’s all well and good to say, for example, that you want to get better at playing the guitar, but how will you know when you’ve done what you set out to do? Instead, you might set a goal to master the C major, G major, and pentatonic and harmonic scales so that you’re good enough to riff with a coworker’s band.
4. Create a plan to track progress
You also want to make sure you create a plan to track your progress toward your long-term goal. You can use a spreadsheet, a to-do list, or a dedicated app, as long as you have a system. You could also enlist an accountability partner—a friend, partner, family member, or colleague—as a support system to help you stay on course and offer encouragement.
Having a strategy will help you maintain motivation as you hit smaller milestones. Check in on your progress, and take time to celebrate your small successes.
5. Be flexible
More likely than not, you are going to have a setback or two along the way. It’s key to set and hold yourself to hard deadlines, but if a short-term goal ends up being a bit more complicated than you initially planned, it’s OK to adjust your long-term timeline.
Examples of personal long-term goals
A personal long-term goal is one that enriches your personal life, whether that be social (like joining a new club or organization) or individually enriching (like learning a new skill or traveling abroad). Here are some examples of personal growth goals:
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Write a book. Start by mapping out the story you’re going to tell, what needs to happen along the way, and how you’re going to accomplish it with daily, weekly, or monthly page goals.
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Get married and start a family. Strategize by thinking about what it is you’re looking for and what’s important to you in a life partner. Are there non-negotiables? Where will you compromise?
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Learn to cook. If you’ve ever read the book or seen the movie Julie & Julia—in which author Julie Powell cooks every recipe in Julia Child’s French cookbook—you have a decent blueprint for how this might look.
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Learn a new language. Start with small goals like using a language-learning app daily or enrolling in a class, then move up to more ambitious interim goals like an immersion program or homestay abroad.
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Travel to every continent. Plan which countries you want to visit, set a timeline, determine your budget, and start saving.
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Turn your hobby into a side hustle. To launch your own business on the side, first assess the market for your hobby, then consider testing the waters with a pop-up shop.
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Run a marathon. Set up a fitness plan and check 5ks and half-marathons off your list on your way to 26.2 miles.
Examples of professional long-term goals
A professional long-term goal is one that focuses on your overall long-term career path. This goal could be something centered on the day-to-day operations of your current job (like improving team productivity), or it could be a big-picture career goal (like changing industries).
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Change careers to something you love. Start by figuring out how difficult this new industry is to break into and whether you’ll need to go back to school. Set up informational interviews with people in your desired career, and start building your network.
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Get a senior-level promotion. Meet with your boss to talk about your ambitions, what benchmarks you’d need to meet to achieve your goal, and a reasonable timeline.
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Launch an online store.Starting an online store can be a rewarding endeavor. To begin, consider product opportunities and build your website.
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Improve team productivity. Identify how you’re going to measure your team’s productivity and clearly state the goal. Set up progress reports for accountability, and build in rhythms of rest and celebration for a healthy work-life balance.
Examples of financial long-term goals
Whether it be seeking to achieve financial independence, plotting to pay off credit card debt, building up an emergency fund, or saving for a future big purchase, financial long-term goals hinge on your ability to build wealth.
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Buy a house. Research potential neighborhoods, decide on a budget, and put together a plan and save for a down payment.
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Create a fund for your child. If you want to create a fund for your child to access when they turn 18, you’ll need to choose an investment strategy and set a plan for frequent contributions.
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Save for retirement. On average, American adults retire somewhere between the ages of 62 and 65, which gives you a time-bound reference for your long-term goal. The average amount needed to live in retirement varies between $60,000 and $130,000 a year, depending on where you live and your desired lifestyle.
Pay off student loans. Plan out a budget to ensure you can make monthly payments for your student loans, and strategize how you can minimize interest.
Long-term goals FAQ
What is an example of a long-term goal?
Writing a book is a perfect example of a long-term goal. There’s a clear endpoint and clear short-term metrics you can use to track your progress. You could, for example, give yourself the short-term goal of writing five pages every week, or measure progress by how many chapters you complete each month.
How do I write a long-term goal?
Really zero in on the vision you have for your goal. Visualize what achieving that goal will look like and then make sure you’re strategizing SMART goals when writing it down. SMART is an acronym to ensure your goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
How do I meet my long-term goal?
It’s helpful to figure out what smaller, short-term goals you can use to measure and track the progress of your long-term goal. Achieving these short-term goals will help you stay on track to meet your long-term goal.
Are long-term goals important?
Yes, long-term goals can be incredibly important to your personal life and professional development, as well as your overall happiness and well-being. They allow you to focus on purpose and what you want to achieve.
