Believe It Or Not, A Counter-Intuitive Goal Setting Process That Allowed Me To Produce The Best Missionary Results In Taiwan’s History… Can Work For You, Too.

By Rich Harshaw

“Those giant white guys on huge bicycles.”

Even though I only stand a modest six feet tall wearing shoes in the United States, when I served two years as a Mormon missionary in Taipei, Taiwan, I was considered a giant. Everyone knew us as those giant white guys that rode huge bicycles around town.

And oh, did we ride around! Mormon missionaries adhere to extremely regimented schedules: Up by 6:30 AM, studying and preparing until 9:30… then out on the streets riding those giant bicycles around to find and teach people about the church until 9:30 PM. Six days a week. With no access to TV, radio, cell phones, internet, music, dating, or any other “normal” nineteen-year-old activities. In terms of learning, growth, confidence, and maturity, nothing beats paying your own way to serve strangers full-time for two years in a foreign country like you do as a Mormon missionary. Nothing else even comes close.

Or stated differently, what were you doing when you were nineteen?

One of the first challenges I faced was learning Mandarin, Chinese. Before June, 1988, the only words I knew in that exotic language were “kung fu” and “ping pong.” Two years later I was fluent enough that I could fool people into thinking I was a native speaker over the phone. I learned the language using the exact method of goal setting I’m about to set forth for you in this article. Keep reading.

By October, 1989, I had been in Taiwan long enough to have mostly mastered the language, and at the ripe old age of twenty, I was called to serve as a “District Leader” for the Keelung District, which consisted of eight missionaries divided into four companionships, including my own. My job was to conduct weekly trainings, motivate the troops, and report statistics to the mission headquarters in Taipei.

That same month our mission president issued a challenge to each of the thirty or so districts in the mission to set a two-month goal for baptisms for November and December. We were to set the goals as a district, report the goal to headquarters, then formulate a plan for achieving that goal.

The results of this activity were surprising to say the least.

Collectively, as a mission, the two-month goal was 390 baptisms—or an average of 195 per month. To put that in perspective, the monthly average for the entire mission at the time was about twenty-eight. In other words, our audacious goal was about seven times higher than our historical averages.

That’s what you call a tall order.

To make matters worse, my district was traditionally one of the worst baptizing districts in the entire mission. There had only been four baptisms in the entire year before I arrived there, and morale and work ethic were at an all-time low.

Which made our district’s goal of nineteen for the two-month period seem even more audacious than the mission as a whole—we decided to shoot for almost TEN TIMES our average, which seemed pretty reckless as a goal if you just look at the surface numbers.

But I was convinced it was NOT a reckless goal—in fact, it was a very well calculated one. That’s because I used the process I’m going to teach you here called “Backward Goal Setting.”

Regular Goal Setting Doesn’t Work

To understand what Backward Goal Setting is and why it’s so effective, it will be useful to first review the tenants of “regular” goal setting. Regular goal setting calls for the goal setter to think up a BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) and write it down so it motivates them to action. After all, as they say, a goal not written is only a wish.

But in reality, a goal that’s written down is seldom more than a wish. If the idea is to write something down, look at it in the mirror every morning, then try as hard as you can to “achieve it,” failure is almost certain. The psychology of why that’s true is more complex than I want to get into in this article, but here’s the short version: if your brain doesn’t believe it can actually achieve the BHAG, it pretty much shuts down right away, robbing you of any chance to even start, let alone achieve, the goal.

Big goals freeze the brain. They render you actionless, because it’s too hard to know where to even start. If a missionary district wants to baptize nineteen people in the same time span where they normally get one, nobody believes it, and nobody runs after it. Same thing goes for “making a million dollars” or “losing fifty pounds” or “running a marathon.” The mind can’t wrap itself around that kind of goal.

Another reason big goals fail to motivate is because there are too many factors between point A (setting the goal) and point Z (achieving the big goal) that you simply can’t control. What if you work as hard as you can for a year, but you only make $100,000 instead of a million? What if you exercise religiously and carefully monitor your calories, but you only lose ten pounds instead of fifty? How is that possible? Just ask dieters all over the world—it happens all the time. The fact is you cannot accurately predict ahead of time what results your efforts will yield. You just can’t.

Break It Down Into The Simplest Components

Which is where Backward Goal Setting comes into play. Backward goal setting arrives at a “big number” through the back door—but spends zero time actually thinking about or worrying about that big number. Instead, backward goal setting focuses on the small steps that lead to the bigger prize… and here’s the kicker: it only concerns itself with the bite-sized things that can easily be measured… and that you absolutely have 100% control over. 100% control. That’s the key.

So for our missionary goal, we worked our numbers backward like this:

• To baptize somebody, you first had to teach them a series of six lessons. About 75% of all people who heard all six lessons got baptized. But most of the people who started on lesson one dropped out somewhere before they got to six.
• There was a big drop off after lesson two; after lesson two, about 50% of the people dropped out.
• There was an even bigger drop off after lesson one; about 70% of the people who heard lesson one never came back for lesson two.
• To find somebody to teach a FIRST lesson to, we had to set appointments with at least three people, because two-thirds would no-show their appointment. We knew this from long experience.
• To find three people to set appointments with, we had to ask thirty people if they would be willing to set an appointment to hear the lesson—based on about a 10% ask-to-accept ratio.
• If we wanted to find thirty people to ask if they would hear the lesson, we had to strike up conversations with about 120 people—owing to ratio of about 4-to-1.

And that’s really all we needed to know to set our audacious goal.

Here’s what we decided to focus on: The one thing that was 100% in our control—how many people we talked to each day. After some discussion about work ethic and resolve, we decided that each of the four companionships would strike up conversations with 100 people per day, for a total of 400 people per day between all of us. At the time, 100 per week per companionship was considered outstanding.

So let’s run the numbers:

• Striking up conversations with 400 people a day meant:
  • 200 people invited to hear a first lesson (50%)
  • 20 people who would accept the invitation to hear the first lesson (10%)
  • 7 people who would actually show up for the first lesson (33%)
  • 2 people who would come back for a 2^nd lesson (30%)
  • 1 people who would make it through all 6 lessons (50%)
  • .75 people who would be baptized (75%)

Astonishingly, nobody had ever worked through those numbers before. Ever. It’s easy to see why overall production had been so low historically—it took a lot of really hard work just to find the few who would make it all the way to the finish line. All the missionaries knew it was hard work—they just hadn’t ever quantified HOW hard the work was.

But instead of being scared off by hard work, we put our heads down and just did it. What else were we going to do all day? It was a lot easier work hard and face tons of rejection when you realized that every NO was bringing you one step closer to a YES.

We committed as a group to contacting 10,000 people on the streets. 10,000 contacts, per our numbers, should net us about nineteen baptisms. So I dutifully reported our goal of nineteen to the mission headquarters.

And off we went into the streets of Keelung to talk to as many people as we could, which was actually pretty easy because the streets in the downtown area near our church building were teeming with busy commuters coming to and from the nearby bus and train station. All we had to do was stick out our big white hands and offer to shake. We could strike up as many conversations as we were willing to try.

After several days we realized the fatal flaw in our plan: once we got busy teaching all those first and second lessons, we realized we had a lot less time to actually contact more new people. So the goal of talking to 10,000 people started to fall further behind over the second and third weeks…. but boy oh boy did we teach a lot of lessons.

By Thanksgiving, we already had two people ready to be baptized. Then on December 10^th, we baptized eight more. In a single day. That was a record for Taiwan for one day as far as anyone could research the records. I was transferred out to another city the next day—but three more were baptized shortly thereafter, and another two on Christmas Day as the tidal wave continued.

I got to my new district just in time to infect them with this Backward Goal Setting mindset, and by the end of the two-month goal period, Keelung had baptized fifteen of the nineteen it had committed to. My new district had committed to ten for the period, and we managed to get them to seven by the end of the month. Hey, this stuff actually works.

Language Learning

As previously mentioned, I had actually started using this Backward Goal Setting method over a year earlier when I started learning to speak Mandarin, Chinese. It essentially boiled down to committing to a certain number of vocabulary words that I would learn per day, and an unfailing commitment to do them regardless of how late I had to stay up to get them. I won’t bore you with the exact numbers; just know that I became functionally fluent in Chinese in six months, and was proficient at an expert level within twelve months. Hey, this stuff actually works.

So what about you? Yes, I know you’re not a Mormon missionary. But there are things you want to accomplish in 2015, right? Instead of setting a BHAG, instead, focus on the baby steps it will take to get there.

• If you’re trying to lose weight, focus on a specific calorie intake number per day—and forget about how many pounds you’ll lose in six months.
• If you’re trying to earn money, focus on how many home improvement leads you will generate; or how many presentations you’ll make; or how many events you’ll attend. Or whatever makes sense in your situation.
• If you’re trying to improve your relationship with your spouse, try rubbing his/her feet for twenty minutes a day. Every day. See if that works.
• If you’re trying to help your kid with basketball, have him shoot 100 shots each day with his left hand, then his right hand. Forget about making the varsity team or averaging twenty points a game. Focus on shooting. Or whatever.
• If you’re trying to increase your spirituality, commit right now to ten minutes a day of prayer or meditation. Or reading one Bible chapter a day. Or something that you can completely control.

Get the idea? This really isn’t that hard—you just have to break down your goal to its smallest measurable component and focus on that.

If a giant nineteen-year-old white kid on an enormous bike can do it, surely you can too.

© 2014 – 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.