Want to measure your success? Take a look back

"My father had three jobs and went to school at night. If I go to the cleaners and the bank in the same day, I need a nap." - Larry Miller

"What age are you going to die?"

That's how Dan Sullivan, the founder of the consulting firm The Strategic Coach, opens his first goal-setting session with entrepreneurs. Makes sense: Start with the end of the story and work the plot backward.

(By the way, if you'd like to go one better and have an actual date for your death to work with, you can go to the website deathclock.com and get one, along with a second-by-second countdown. You put in a few items such as gender, weight, and height, and it does a calculation. If you're the sort to plan ahead and would like to be there at my funeral, then have the dark suit pressed for Aug. 8, 2043.)

But back to goal-setting.

A decade ago the folks at Fast Company magazine investigated the famous Yale Class of '53 study, the one stating that only 3 percent of the grads had made goals for their lives, but that those 3 percent accumulated more wealth than the other 97 percent combined. The folks at the magazine's consultant debunking unit could find no evidence of such a study ever being done, and every motivational speaker they asked credited the story to another motivational speaker. One speaker, confronted with suspicions about the authenticity of the data, responded, "If it isn't true, it should be."

These days the motivationalists are dressing up goal-setting as "visualization" -- just picture what you want, and it will happen. Which brings us to this quote (take a guess at who said it): "It's a visual thing. That's why I'm here right now, because I dreamed of these moments. Kids need that. If they don't dream, they have what?" Well, they have a childhood, of course. That's Britney Spears speaking, and thus has a special poignancy for those of us who smiled at her early success. I wonder if things would have been different for Spears if she had dreamed of, say, being a person of admirable character. Then again, what help did society give her or anyone else with that dream? No, the TV program "Dancing With the People of Admirable Character" never caught on.

What troubles me about goal-setting is the dreary materialism it usually inspires; it's life by numbers, greed as destiny. Notice that the story about the Yale goal-setters was that their "net worth" exceeded their goal-less classmates. As if that was true worth. Indeed there's one argument that unless you plan success, it isn't really success -- you know, the old bit about if you don't know your destination, you'll never get there.

But life is more creative than we are. Take Maya Angelou, whose dream as a young woman was to quit her waitressing job by finding a husband, having children, and being a stay-at-home mom. If you don't have a map, you could end up anywhere and isn't that a call to adventure?

When I was a kid I dreamed of being Bill Bradley. Not only did I visualize my little heart out, I practiced every day. My problem wasn't lack of a goal or even lack of effort; it was lack of talent. And I wonder if Bill Bradley ever feels let down, for surely his goals included being president. Hey, he had the talent and the dreams . . . and yet . . . and yet. I wonder if he agonizes over having fallen short.

Well, he wouldn't if he were to sit in with Dan Sullivan, the consultant with whom we started. Sullivan insists the problem with success in our culture is that it's measured forward instead of backward. What he means by that is that we measure achievements against our hopes, against an ideal, and thus we are doomed to fall short. Sullivan suggests looking backward, asking yourself how you are doing against your former self. Are you better at 40 than at 30?

There's something comforting in that, isn't there? Something real and important and solidly THERE. Are you wealthier now than a year ago? Not a bad question, but let's end with a better one: Do you have more wealths this year than last? It won't make for a TV show, but it might get you to turn the TV off.

Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.