Find Out How to Set Your Goal Now – Part 1 – S.M.A.R.T.

Specific (simple, sensible, significant).

The first step is to determine what you want. Often we can be ambiguous, saying we want to make more money, to lose/gain weight, to meet someone, to get a promotion. You can break this down by having the very specific scenario, outcome you want, if you had to achieve it, how much more money would it be, how much weight, how is the person, promotion to which role.

There are the 5 W's, which covers specific aspects as well as the others.
Whatis it? what qualities do you need?
Who is it for? Who do you need to become? 

Why do you want it? Why? Go deep and ask 5 layers why? why does it motivate you?

where? where will this be achieve? where will your actions take place? 

When? Discussed in the T section, but essentially when do you want to achieve

Measurable

Once it is figured out, you should know how to measure it, to see how close you are getting.
This is more easily done in some goals, where the goal is progressive, such as learning a skill, changing your weight, increase the efficiency in an activity to get things done quicker. Here you can measure what you want and where you want to be, against where you are at the time of measuring.

 But the goal might be accomplished by an event, out of our direct control, such as a promotion, meeting a special someone, winning an award, etc. Here what you can do is see what would influence the other people to make the event happening, so this includes the way you are, our outputs, how you carry yourself. And do not lose hope if it takes time, as things often happen when you least expect, from personal experience can say this happened various times.

Now you can still do this and things not happen, so is your goal A... (see next letter)

Attainable

Can it be done? There are ways to measure this, and pessimisits will often say something that can be done cannot, and dreamers vice versa. You don't want to be either. There are ways to check:
-Has it been done before by someone? Someone from your background? f not to either, why not? Can you do something to make the situation more favourable? For example, there are always firsts to do certain things, others were not able because the situation was didfferent (society mentality, limited knowledge, no opportunities, etc), but if your stance is more favourable, even if the thing different is your will power and passion. The A soemtimes stands for actionable, can you take concrete actions to achieve it?
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 Some things are not attainable or seem very hard, if you can break it down do so. For example if you're the average earner and want a million dollars in your account, you can find ways to make £1 first, then £10, £100, £1000, etc, break it down however you want. And make it significantly more likely for this to happen to you, by setting up a successful business, get in the right trade, investing, etc. 

This is a hard one to explain, lets say you aregreat at basketball, but you are very short compred to others, there has been people like Muggsy Bosque who was the shortest but nevertheless one of the best players of NBA history. There are always people who defy probabilities and believes. So here its much harder, but its not impossible, your work rate and deliverables will have to outweight any disadvantages or believes, its not about the lack of weaknesses, but key strenghts. *There are inumerous stories about people.

Time bound.
"Some day I will (insert desire)". Without a deadline, things rarely get done, at least in time. Also it adds motivation. You may say I want to want to be able to run a marathon, improve personal relationships, etc, after you are specific enough, measure stages, consider it attainable and actionable and relevant, it can still never be done if your actions and outcomes are not tied to time.

This works two ways. You want to achieve it as fast as you want it, so get two it.

Too soon may also be a problem as you may simply fail or put too much stress on yourself.

So how do you find the balance? How do you know even if your deadlines for each broken actionable piece is attainable? 

-See how long it took others in average;

-Break the goal down into even smaller pieces and see how long each should take. 

-Work backwards, if something takes X amount of time, then the second last action would need to happen by X date, and the one before and so on.

-Adjust, as you go, or may do struggle, get stuck, find ways to go around it.

Commitment! Last ingredient.