Think bigger. Follow your dreams. Don’t play small. We’ve heard all this before (and probably said it a time or two) but do we do it? 

No. We’re lawyers. Logical, careful, traditional. We don’t like risk. At least when it comes to our business. 

So we take ten years to reach our goals, if we reach them at all, when we might reach those goals in one. That’s what authors like Tim Ferriss, Benjamin Hardy, Grant Cardone, and others tell us. 

“Impossible goals are easier to accomplish than “possible goals” they say. And they actually have a point. 

When you set reasonable goals and seek incremental growth, to increase your income by 10%, for example, you have too many options and strategies to choose from. These are the “trivial many” in 80/20 parlance. Small ideas, common strategies, that are likely to only reach small results. 

To grow by more than 10%, we should be looking at the “precious few”. 

To increase your income by 10%, you might look for a new marketing technique or improve an existing one. You’ll do what you’re already doing or something like it. With hard work and a little luck, you might achieve the goal. But because the goal is small and unexciting, you also might lose enthusiasm, get busy with other things, or bump heads with every other lawyer who is trying to do what you’re trying to do. 

Instead of walking, you need to run. Instead of playing it safe, you need to do things you’ve never done before. 

Not only are these likely to be more exciting and motivating, they are the only things that offer you a chance of achieving massive growth. 

The reason they do that is simple. Impossible goals force you to innovate and find things nobody else has thought of, let alone is doing. Find and focus on those precious few ideas, connections, or strategies, and you can grow much bigger and much faster.  

Impossibly big goals help us to “shape the process,” in part by making us ask better questions. If you ask, “What would I have to do to increase my income by 10% this year?” you get a long list of options. If you ask, “What would I have to do, or what would have to happen, to grow my income by 1000%?” you get a very small list of options to choose from, and you only need one.

The idea comes from “constraint theory” which is explained in the book, “The Goal”. Every goal, but especially a big goal, has a core restraint or bottleneck that is keeping the business from achieving it. Most people don’t focus on the bottleneck or constraint. They focus on the 80% that doesn’t matter. 

Growing by 10% is about doing more. Possibly a lot more and for a long time. Growing by 1000% and achieving your impossible dream is about doing something different.