Beyond SMART and SMARTER Goals
How to Navigate the Critical Divide Between Goal-Setting and Goal-Achieving
You know the feeling.
The surge of clarity that comes when you define your goal. The sense of control that comes when you write it down. The satisfaction of checking off each component of the SMART goal framework.
Yet three months later, that same goal sits abandoned, another casualty in the war between intention and execution.
This scenario repeats itself because too many people confuse goal-setting with goal-achieving. They are not the same process. Understanding the difference means the difference between perpetual frustration and sustained success in your self-mastery journey.
The Great Misconception
Goal-setting involves two key steps: (i) defining what you want to accomplish and (ii) creating a plan to achieve it. It includes specificity, measurability, timelines, and all the structural elements that frameworks like SMART provide. Goal-achieving, however, encompasses the sustained motivation, behavioral changes, and persistent execution required to reach your objective.
Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, the pioneering researchers who developed goal-setting theory (GST) over 35 years of empirical research, distinguish between goal content and goal commitment. Their work demonstrates that, while specific and challenging goals consistently lead to higher performance than vague or easy goals, the relationship between goal-setting and goal achievement depends heavily on psychological factors that extend far beyond the goal itself.
Setting a goal creates direction. Achieving it requires sustained energy over time. The two processes require different skills, different mindsets, and different strategies.
The Psychology Behind the Divide
Locke and Latham's research reveals that goals affect performance through four primary mechanisms: they direct attention, mobilize effort, enhance persistence, and promote the development of effective strategies. However, these mechanisms activate only when you maintain sufficient goal commitment throughout the execution phase.
The initial act of setting a goal triggers the formation of a goal intention. You decide what you want and commit to pursuing it. This creates a temporary surge of motivation. Your brain releases dopamine in anticipation of the reward, giving you that characteristic excitement of a new beginning.
However, goal achievement requires an implementation intention. That is, the specific plan for how you will act when faced with obstacles and the inevitable dips in motivation that occur during execution. This is where most people fail. They mistake the temporary high of goal-setting for the steady fuel needed for goal achievement.
Goals as Fuel
Here lies a key insight from goal-setting theory: the goal itself becomes a source of motivation, but only when you properly internalize it. Locke and Latham found that goals influence motivation through their relationship to personal satisfaction and self-efficacy. When you make progress toward a meaningful goal, you experience the intrinsic satisfaction that fuels continued effort.
This creates a performance-satisfaction cycle. Success on goal-related tasks enhances your belief in your ability to achieve the goal, which in turn increases your commitment, leading to improved performance and greater satisfaction. The goal becomes self-reinforcing.
However, this cycle only functions when your initial goal-setting process connects the objective to deeper sources of intrinsic motivation. External goals imposed by others or chosen solely for external rewards tend to generate less commitment and weaker performance over time.
Understanding Motivation Types
Extrinsic motivation drives you toward rewards or away from punishments. It provides initial energy but tends to weaken over time unless continuously reinforced.
Intrinsic motivation comes from the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself or the alignment between the goal and your core values.
Most goal-setting frameworks focus on structure and clarity but ignore motivational sustainability. They help you define what you want, but not why you want it, at a deep enough level to sustain long-term effort. This is why you can easily set goals but struggle to maintain motivation when progress slows or obstacles appear.
Goals connected to intrinsic values, such as personal growth and meaningful relationships, generate more sustained motivation than goals focused purely on external outcomes, like wealth or status. This doesn't mean external goals are bad, but they need to be connected to deeper, intrinsic purposes to provide lasting motivation.
The Limitations of SMART Goals
The SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) provides valuable structure for goal-setting but falls short in addressing goal achievement. Its focus on clarity and measurability helps with the initial definition but offers little guidance for maintaining motivation or overcoming obstacles during execution.
Various SMARTER frameworks attempt to address these gaps.
The Emergence of SMARTER Goals
The most common version incorporates “Evaluate” and “Readjust” components, offering mechanisms for course correction while still operating primarily at the structural level.
Michael Hyatt's SMARTER framework takes a different approach entirely, restructuring the original acronym to emphasize psychological and motivational factors: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Risky, Time-keyed, Exciting, and Relevant.
Hyatt's "Actionable" component replaces "Achievable" and emphasizes that every goal should start with an action verb rather than a to-be verb. This shifts the focus from static outcomes to dynamic behaviors, recognizing that goals must be translated into concrete actions.
His "Risky" element captures the importance of appropriate challenge levels. As he explains, "a good goal should stretch you, but not too much. I go right up to the edge of my comfort zone and then step over it. If I am not out of my comfort zone, I'm not thinking big enough." This aligns directly with Locke and Latham's research, showing that challenging goals produce higher performance than easy ones, while acknowledging the need to avoid overwhelming difficulty that can undermine commitment.
The "Exciting" component addresses emotional engagement: “You should be personally excited about achieving the goal. If this isn't the case, then you likely won't have the motivation necessary to continue pursuing the goal when you encounter unexpected challenges—which you inevitably will." This directly acknowledges the motivational sustainability problem that traditional frameworks ignore.
Hyatt's "Relevant" component extends beyond simple alignment to encompass values, life context, and goal integration: "your goal should be relevant—or aligned with—your values, your season in life, and your other goals." This acknowledges the importance of intrinsic motivation and contextual appropriateness, which research has demonstrated to be critical for sustained commitment.
Hyatt's framework represents a significant improvement over traditional SMART goals by incorporating psychological insights about motivation, challenge, and emotional engagement. However, it still operates primarily at the goal-construction level rather than addressing the ongoing systems and behaviors required for sustained execution.
While "Actionable" and "Exciting" move toward implementation concerns, the framework doesn't provide guidance for maintaining excitement when initial enthusiasm wanes or for building the environmental supports and habit systems that research shows are essential for long-term behavioral change.
Unresolved Issues and Remaining Gaps
The fundamental limitation of SMART and SMARTER goals remains the assumption that better goal construction leads to better goal achievement. Even psychologically informed frameworks, such as Hyatt’s, underestimate the ongoing challenges of maintaining motivation, navigating obstacles, and implementing behavior change that distinguish setting goals from achieving them.
How to Bridge the Gap Between Setting and Achieving
Effective goal achievement requires bridging the gap between setting and executing. This means designing your goal-setting process to support sustained motivation rather than just initial clarity.
Start with intrinsic alignment. Before you worry about making your goal SMART, explore why it matters to you at a deeper level. How does achieving this goal serve your core values? What aspects of the pursuit itself might you find inherently satisfying? How does success connect to your sense of identity and purpose?
Build implementation systems. Create specific plans for maintaining motivation when it inevitably decreases. Design your environment to support the behaviors necessary for achieving your goals. Establish routines that make progress automatic rather than dependent on daily decision-making.
Focus on process goals alongside outcome goals. While outcome goals provide direction, process goals create the daily behaviors that lead to achievement. If your outcome goal is to write a book, your process goals might include writing for 30 minutes each morning and reading in your genre for 20 minutes each evening.
Practical Application
To apply these insights to your own goals:
Begin with intrinsic exploration. Before structuring your goal, take the time to understand why it truly matters to you, beyond external rewards or expectations.
Design for motivation sustainability. Create systems and environments that support consistent action even when motivation naturally fluctuates.
Balance outcome focus with process focus. Define what success looks like, but invest most of your energy in designing and executing consistent daily practices.
Establish feedback loops that link progress to intrinsic satisfaction, rather than relying solely on external metrics.
Plan for obstacles and dips in motivation as expected parts of the process, rather than signs of failure.
The gap between goal-setting and goal-achieving isn't a problem to solve once and for all. It's an ongoing tension to manage throughout your self-mastery journey. Understanding this difference allows you to approach goals with more realistic expectations and more effective strategies. You can enjoy the clarity that comes from good goal-setting while building the systems and mindset required for actual achievement.
For Further Study
Hyatt, Michael. “The Beginner's Guide to Goal Setting.” Full Focus (blog), March 21, 2022. https://fullfocus.co/goal-setting/.
Locke, Edwin A., and Gary P. Latham. A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990.
Locke, Edwin A., and Gary P. Latham. "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey." American Psychologist 57, no. 9 (2002): 705-717.
Locke, Edwin A., and Gary P. Latham. “New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, no. 5 (2006): 265–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20183128.
Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan. "The 'What' and 'Why' of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior." Psychological Inquiry 11, no. 4 (2000): 227-268.