10 Goal-Setting Tips Used by High Performers
Goal-Setting Fundamentals
A free resource from Goal Machine by Darren Whitaker-Barnett
Purpose
High performers do not rely on motivation alone. They build systems. The tips in this resource are drawn from a career spent across elite sport, sales, leadership, and building a global technology company — and from the research behind the Three Laws and Five Principles of Goal Machine. Each tip connects to one of those principles. Together, they form the habit layer of a performance system that works whether you use dedicated software, a shared spreadsheet, or a notebook.
The Principles It Serves
All Five Principles — Direction, Why, How, Competence, and Recognition — and all Three Laws. Each tip is labelled with the principle it connects to most directly.
The Resource
Write It Down — Every Single Day
Direction
There is a reason the first chapter of Goal Machine begins with a boy and a notebook. Writing a goal down is not a productivity habit. It is the first act of creating direction. When a goal exists only in your head, it competes with every other thought you have. It fades when you are tired, disappears when you are distracted, and loses its shape under pressure. When it exists on a page — specific, concrete, visible — it becomes something external to you. Something that holds its shape even when you do not. Write your goals down today. Then write them again tomorrow.
Set Goals That Are Uncomfortably Ambitious
Direction
Most goals are set to be achieved. The ones that change your career are set to stretch you beyond what you thought was possible. When WhosOnLocation was competing against companies raising ten to one hundred times our capital, we did not set goals that matched our resources. We set goals that matched our ambition — and then built the daily system to close the gap. Ambitious goals do not just push you to work harder. They push you to think differently, to find leverage, and to discover capabilities you did not know you had. Do not ask what is realistic. Ask what would be extraordinary — then work backwards from there.
Connect Every Goal to a Reason That Survives Difficulty
Why
Goals without purpose rarely survive the months when progress is invisible. Purpose is not an inspirational statement on a wall — it is the answer to the question every person asks when the work gets hard: why does this still matter? When my team at WhosOnLocation understood that we were not just building visitor management software but helping organisations keep people safe, that purpose created a resilience that our funding round never could. Connect every goal you set — for yourself and for your team — to something genuinely worth sustaining effort for. If you cannot find it, the goal will not hold.
Translate Every Goal Into a Daily Action
How
A goal without a daily action is just an intention with a deadline. The most important question you can ask when you set a goal is not ‘what do I want to achieve?’ It is ‘what will I do tomorrow morning that moves me toward it?’ Large goals feel impossible until you break them into the smallest possible daily action. Progress compounds. The sales professional who reviews their pipeline for fifteen minutes every morning for ninety days will outperform the one who does it once a week — not because they worked harder, but because they stayed closer to the work. Identify the daily action for every goal you set. Then protect it.
Track Progress — Not Just Results
How
Most measurement systems track outcomes at the end of a period. By the time you know you missed the target, there is nothing left to fix. The leaders and teams that sustain performance track progress along the way — what moved forward, what improved, what is measurably better than it was last week. This is not about creating more reporting. It is about creating a feedback loop early enough to act on. Ask every week: what got better? Progress builds confidence, and confidence builds the momentum that perfection kills.
Make Your Goals Visible
Direction
A goal that is written down but hidden achieves nothing more than a goal that is not written down at all. Visibility is what gives the goal its power over daily behaviour. Keep your goals somewhere you will see them every day — a journal, a shared dashboard, a whiteboard in the room where your team meets. Visibility creates a daily signal without requiring anyone else to hold you to it. The boy picking berries in Palmerston North tracked his tally not because someone told him to, but because seeing the number grow changed how he worked.
Track Your Wins
Recognition
High performers track what they did, not just what they did not. Recording wins — however small — reinforces motivation, builds confidence, and strengthens commitment to the goal, especially in the weeks when overall progress feels slow. This is not about pretending things are better than they are. It is about making sure that what is going right stays visible alongside what still needs to improve. Recognition does not have to come from a manager. It starts with noticing your own progress. What gets noticed gets repeated.
Build Accountability Into the Goal — Not Just the Outcome
Recognition
When someone else knows your goal, the cost of giving up stops being invisible. Accountability is not about surveillance or pressure — it is about raising the stakes of your own commitment to a level that makes follow-through more likely than abandonment. A mentor, a manager, a peer, or a coach — the right person changes everything. Choose someone who will ask hard questions rather than easy ones. The goal does not change. But your relationship to it does.
Review and Reset Every 90 Days
How
A goal set in January and revisited in December is not a goal — it is an aspiration with a filing date. Modern work moves faster than a twelve-month planning cycle allows. Priorities shift. Markets change. What was the right direction in Q1 may be the wrong one by Q3. Review your goals every ninety days — what progressed, what stalled, what needs to shift — so your direction stays current without losing continuity. The 90-day cycle is not about starting over. It is about staying honest.
Build a System — Not Just a List of Goals
All Five Principles
The most important shift in this book is simple: goals set direction, but systems create performance. A list of goals without a system is a list of intentions. A system means clear direction, a reason strong enough to sustain effort, daily habits that close the gap between intention and outcome, a feedback loop that tells you whether you are getting better, and recognition that reinforces the behaviours that drive results. Those five things — Direction, Why, How, Competence, Recognition — are the Goal Machine. Build all five, and performance stops being something you chase. It becomes something your system produces.
How to Use This Resource
Read through all ten tips and identify the two or three where the gap between where you are and where you need to be is largest. These are your starting points — not as a project, but as a daily practice. Apply one tip at a time for two weeks before adding another. The goal is not to implement all ten at once. It is to build the habit layer that makes your goals work.
For leaders: use this resource in a one-to-one conversation or team session. Ask each person to identify the one tip they most need to apply — and the one daily action that would make it real. Keep the conversation specific. Generic commitments do not survive Monday morning.
A Final Note
The first law of Goal Machine states that goals set direction, but systems create performance. Every tip in this resource is a building block of the system. None of them works in isolation — the power is in the combination. Direction without daily action creates intention without execution. Daily action without recognition loses momentum over time. What you are building, tip by tip, is not a better goal-setting habit. You are building the operating system that makes consistent performance possible. That is what this book is about. And it is what these ten tips are designed to help you start.
