CHAPTER 3

GOAL

It’s the idea that matters. It doesn’t matter where you come from or what your background is. One revolutionary idea, one brilliant invention can unleash other entrepreneurs to revolutionize industries in ways you can never predict.

SUNDAR PICHAI, CEO, ALPHABET (GOOGLE)

A few years ago, Alexandra Dean told me about Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, a documentary Dean and producer Adam Haggiag were working on. As a film buff, I knew Hedy Lamarr was a glamorous Hollywood film star and Austrian Jewish immigrant, but I didn’t know Lamarr was also an ingenious inventor, a pioneer in modern communications technology.

In 1937 Lamarr left her husband, an Austrian weapons manufacturer. At dinner parties during her marriage, Lamarr had heard her husband’s business associates talk about building weapons and developing detection devices to listen to and jam American aircraft radio signals.

Lamarr wanted to short-circuit their plans.

In the early years of World War II, Lamarr had a clear goal: to invent a device to block enemy ships from jamming U.S. torpedo guidance signals. She met and began working with George Antheil, a composer who shared her interest in invention, to create a device to achieve Lamarr’s goal. “They found a way for the radio guidance transmitter and the torpedo’s receiver to jump simultaneously from frequency to frequency, making it impossible for the enemy to locate and block a message before it had moved to another frequency. This approach became known as ‘frequency hopping,’” Alice George explains in Smithsonian Magazine.¹ Their technique for spread-spectrum communications would become the basis for Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi technologies.

Lamarr had always had an interest in how things work—at the age of five, she dismantled a music box and reassembled it. She never lost that childhood aptitude for invention and passionate curiosity that fueled her goals. So when an urgent purpose arose, Lamarr set her goal.

When setting a goal, you don’t need to clearly articulate the goal, as Lamarr did, for your thinking process to begin. You can start by noticing an opportunity or asking questions.

All professors hope what they say will change their students’ lives for the better. While giving a lecture on sustainability, Alan Ross, a professor of business ethics at the University of California, Berkeley, randomly mentioned that gourmet mushrooms can grow on spent coffee grounds.

Two Berkeley seniors, Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora, each reached out separately to Ross to find out more. Ross connected Velez and Arora, and the two hit it off. Not only had the mushroom factoid piqued their interest, but they also wanted to learn how other foods grow. After the two grew a first crop of mushrooms during their last semester, the Berkeley chancellor awarded them a $5,000 grant. Though they didn’t know much about farming, the pair decided not to pursue corporate business careers in favor of a new goal: becoming urban farmers in Oakland, California. They learned what they needed by watching YouTube videos and trial and error.

To house their urban farm, they rented a warehouse near the airport. They collected spent coffee grounds from Berkeley and Oakland cafés and used them as a growing medium for their mushrooms, which they sold to the local Whole Foods and other stores. Unlike many startups, they made a profit right off. Talking about their business process with host Guy Raz on the NPR podcast How I Built This, Velez and Arora explained that cafés actually paid them to haul away the used coffee grounds, stores paid for the mushrooms grown on the coffee grounds, and other customers paid them for the nutrient-rich coffee soil the mushrooms grew on.² What started out as a homegrown experiment had turned into a successful business.

But the farming duo shifted gears and set a new goal: to “undo food.” They stopped growing mushrooms and started a home organic gardening business, Back to the Roots, selling tabletop grow kits, seeds, and potting soil, which now boasts $100 million in sales. Its products are sold in more than 14,000 stores worldwide, including Whole Foods, Costco, and Nordstrom. And because they care deeply that children understand there is an alternative to processed food, Velez and Arora formed a partnership with food product supplier Sodexo to develop a presence in more than 3,000 schools across the United States. They are on a mission to reconnect families and children to where food comes from by helping them grow it themselves—“no green thumb or backyard needed.” Cofounder and co-CEO Velez said that they’re seeing a great deal of interest from families who want to experience food this way. The seed of a college project has grown into a national brand.

Ask, “What If?”

What if? is a magical question. It invites you to speculate, to wonder. It’s a helpful tool for forming a goal if you don’t have one at the start. Any probing question—such as “If only . . .” and “I wonder . . .”—works to seed ideas, foster a creative mindset, determine goals, and in turn raise other questions. These types of questions foster imaginative and unconventional avenues of thought. On his website, author Neil Gaiman advises, “You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if . . . ?”³

Here are a few examples to demonstrate how you can speculate to pin down a goal:

What if . . .

•there were a tool that allowed the world to collaborate from home? (think Zoom)

•we could remotely check pacemakers using our smartphones? (think MyCareLink Heart mobile app)

•we could book a commercial flight to outer space on a rocketship? (think SpaceX)

•we could have grid-free electricity? (think Reeddi, a compact and portable solar-powered battery)

•we valued digital art in a whole new way? (think NFTs [worthwhile for our planet?])

You know the answers to these what-if questions because people set them as goals and then went on to realize them.

The Canadian Down Syndrome Society and Google asked their own what-if question: What if voice technology could be trained in a specific way? Their goal: making voice assistants more accessible.

If you’ve ever used voice-assisted technology, you know it can be tricky. Although all of the kinks in this technology have not yet been worked it out, we will be relying on it more and more; soon there will be billions of voice assistants.⁴

But if the future is voice-first, does it include everyone? For people living with Down syndrome, voice-assisted technology could be extremely useful, allowing them to live more independently by doing everything from providing appointment reminders to offering directions on how to do things. However, although technologies using voice commands are becoming commonplace, they aren’t trained to understand people with Down syndrome and others with atypical speech patterns.

The Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS) and ad agency FCB Toronto saw the gap in voice-assisted technology—it wasn’t inclusive and therefore not equitable. They asked, What if we could make voice assistants more accessible? Not only would there be a gain for people living with Down syndrome, but the technology would eventually benefit others with different forms of atypical speech.

The goal of the CDSS and FCB was to ensure that voice-assisted technology would serve people living with Down syndrome. Once they decided to pursue their goal, they realized they needed support and partnered with Google.⁵ The idea was to teach Google’s voice-assisted technology to recognize voice commands from people with Down syndrome.

The CDSS explains that machines learn through data. Having more data certainly increases the accuracy of the machine. “To teach voice technology, the data we need are voice recordings. . . . The more voice samples shared by the Down syndrome community, the closer we get to a world where every person is understood.”⁶

CDSS and Google asked people with Down syndrome to donate their voices. People could fill out a form, log in with Google, and start recording phrases. They were asked to recruit others. Because not all human speech is the same, each voice added helped Google’s artificial intelligence technology better understand. “By reading and recording simple phrases, we can help Google recognize your unique speech patterns to improve Google’s system. Your voice recordings will be used for the purpose of research, with the goal to ultimately improve the accuracy of speech recognition for people with Down syndrome.”⁷

The gain beyond that? “By sharing their voices with Google, people with Down syndrome are becoming the teachers,” said FCB chief creative officer Nancy Crimi-Lamanna. “They’re not only taking the lead on helping to ensure a more accessible future for people with Down syndrome, but in the process, demonstrating just how capable they are by teaching Google, one of the smartest technologies on earth.”⁸

FCB’s website noted, “Though people with Down syndrome are often associated with needing help, the campaign flips the stereotype around and turns them into the helpers.”⁹

Project Understood is a worthwhile idea. The CDSS and FCB asked “What if” to ensure that people with Down syndrome are supported within society and treated and portrayed with respect.

Let’s look at Project Understood thinking through the lens of the Three Gs. The CDSS recognized the gap in voice-assisted technology for people with Down syndrome. They understood the incredible gain for this community if Google’s voice-assisted technology were accessible. So the CDSS and FCB Toronto set a goal of teaching Google’s voice-assisted technology to recognize voice commands by people living with Down syndrome.

Challenge the Status Quo

If you are still unsure of your goal, try this—challenge the status quo.

When I started teaching, I suggested revising teaching methods to a more active model as a way of better reaching different types of learners and engaging all students. The response from senior colleagues was, “Well, we’ve always done it this way.”

I’ve heard that before, and I’m sure you’ve heard people say it at work or even at home. Any entrenched mindset fights finding a novel approach. Entrenchment happens when a belief or way of doing something becomes so firmly set that it becomes part of a person’s identity or corporate or organizational culture. When this happens, there often is resistance to changing the status quo. Resisting the status quo helps unlock creative potential.

Just because something has been done one way for a long time doesn’t mean it’s the only way or the right way. People have always enjoyed browsing bookshops and buying books in brick-and-mortar shops. Many would not have believed we would be amenable to buying books online. The big networks traditionally released television programs incrementally. Someone realized people might enjoy binge-watching the entire season of a series. Only thirty years ago, few people shopped via catalog—most preferred to shop in person. Now, online shopping for groceries, electronics, and even cars is a given.

By thinking differently from prevailing conventions, you might discover a goal. Ask yourself, What type of method might be disruptive? New? Not preconceived? Rebellious? Ask a bold or dissenting question.

Challenging the status quo usually means you’re employing unconventional thinking. Your goal might go against prevailing public or professional opinion, against the Star Chamber. Mavericks often conceive ideas that might seem radical or ridiculous to conventional thinkers. And what’s worse, most companies and even schools expect and reward pedestrian thinking to solve problems, relying on established constructs, techniques, methodologies, and practices. This is where you must be brave.

Take Sara Blakely, the founder and owner of the shapewear brand SPANX. She was getting dressed to attend a party when she realized she didn’t have the right undergarment to present the look she wanted. Using her ingenuity, she cut the feet off of her control-top pantyhose to serve as the desired “compression” undergarment. That was the catalyst for SPANX. I’m telling you this story because Blakely is an unconventional thinker. However, she decided not to tell her idea to anyone close to her because she didn’t want to hear “That won’t work.” Conventional thinkers often don’t get unconventional thinking. Blakely set a goal and didn’t want to be dissuaded from achieving it.

You’ve likely heard about established academies balking at new ideas from people who go on to be innovators (think of the critics’ reactions to Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise or Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center; even the practice of handwashing by physicians advocated by Ignaz Semmelweis [in 1846 Vienna] was once controversial). Conventional thinking is thinking within an existing construct or model. Unconventional thinking may follow creative lines of thought that tend to generate original solutions.

Another way to think about pinpointing a goal is to determine a wrong goal. “Business as usual.” “This is the way things are.” “It worked for them so it will work for us.” So many people in leadership positions emphasize the “right” methodology or goal. Thinking of the wrong goal leads you away from pedestrian ones or ones that don’t offer a gain. To combat complacency and same-old thinking, think wrong.

This method works in two ways. C-suite folks often ask, “How can we make what we do better?” Reverse that. Rephrase the question to solicit this goal: “How can we make it worse?” Conceiving the worst solution might inform your thinking or assessment of what people really want. For instance, instead of asking “How can we get more people to subscribe to our evening dress rental service?” ask “How can we get people to unsubscribe?” Illuminating pain points can lead you to ways to improve a service or product, and that improvement becomes a goal.

If you’re trying to improve a food delivery service, for instance, think of all the ways you could get it wrong—all the issues that would annoy people. Late deliveries. Cold food. Wasteful packaging. Rude staff. Chronic delays. Exorbitant service fees. And so on. This way of thinking can help you see what the right goal would be.

Another way this approach works is to set a pedestrian goal, one that has been done before or is painfully dull. If you’re conceiving and designing an advertisement for a brand of facial tissues, a pedestrian goal would be to make sure people notice the brand name by slapping a big picture of the tissue package in the center of the ad or making the logo huge. Seeing the product in that way immediately signals: This is an ad. Who wants to engage with something that’s clearly trying to sell a common commodity to you? Besides, that’s a boring solution—it’s not going to engage or attract anyone except the brand manager. Thinking of wrong or pedestrian solutions prompts you to think of a goal, and ultimately an idea, that would be more engaging and might get under people’s advertising radar.

Maybe that’s not how you think, which is just fine. There are plenty of ways to pinpoint an original goal. As I mentioned earlier, a passion of yours might be your way in.

Follow a Passion

If you’ve ever wondered why Instagram’s original image formats were square rather than the conventional rectangular shape of most photographs, the answer lies with Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom’s experience. When he was a Stanford University student, he studied abroad in Italy, where he brought with him his love of photography and a high-quality camera. His professor in Italy suggested ditching his high-quality camera in favor of a Holga film camera, an inexpensive one that takes square, somewhat distressed-looking (or vintage-style) photos. Systrom agreed and grew to appreciate Holga’s photo quality.

Systrom is also a bourbon aficionado. Years after his college graduation and work experience in tech companies, he created a location-based iPhone app—his first tech solo enterprise—called Burbn, which allowed users to check in at particular locations, make plans for future check-ins, earn points for hanging out with friends, and post pictures of their meetups.

Burbn wasn’t a hit, but Systrom kept tweaking the app, paying close attention to how people were using it. He brought on another programmer, Mike Krieger, and the pair used analytics to determine exactly how their customers were using Burbn. Their findings? People weren’t using Burbn’s check-in features at all. What they were using were the app’s photo-sharing features.¹⁰

After analyzing their data and realizing people were enthusiastically posting and sharing photos, Systrom and Krieger focused on just that—a photo-sharing app we know as Instagram.

Systrom’s love of photography and bourbon fueled his goal.

What are you passionate about? If you love soccer, hiking with friends, or curating fashion, could you determine a goal based on one of your passions? Many people form goals out of an unbridled interest in a subject, activity, or combo of things. An attorney friend had a general goal for her early retirement—she wanted to focus on creative activities. She had always wanted to use her love of art, design, and fashion as the basis for her career, but her pragmatism won out; she became an attorney.

Although her early retirement goal wasn’t specific, she went about exploring creative outlets and experiences. She signed up for dance classes, auditioned for a docent position at an art and design museum (and became the head of the docent corps for two years), and expressed herself daily by curating and wearing unique fashion choices.

One day a man stopped her on a New York City street to ask if he could photograph her. She hesitated at first but ultimately agreed. Although she didn’t know anything about Instagram, she learned how to best use its capabilities, posting his photos of her in various fashion statements and adding lots of relevant hashtags. Now she is an Instagram fashion influencer (@Artfulcitystyle) with more than forty thousand followers. She acts in TV commercials, models in runway shows, and is interviewed in fashion magazines worldwide—all in “retirement” at the age of fifty-plus. Her goal wasn’t specific, but it was clear enough to guide her to her creative passions. There was a gap in fashion icons for women fifty and older, and there are gains for the women she inspires daily, for the designers whose creations she models, and for her own fun in her second act.

Think Small

If you want to be a game designer, start by creating one concept for one game. If you want to be an inventor, start with one invention. Why start modestly? Putting too much pressure on yourself might backfire, whereas the act of conceiving one game has just enough stress to excite you and is a finite goal, which is likely achievable. If you set too big a goal, you might hamstring yourself. Setting more than one goal at a time can be daunting. One goal is all it takes to move toward determining a gap.

Of course, grand goals are divine. World peace. No poverty. And many other noble pursuits. However, thinking too big can make a goal seem indefinable or unmanageable. For instance, during a drought many public service ads ask people to save water. That’s good general advice. It might be more helpful if they were to ask people to set smaller, more practical goals or objectives, such as “Take a shorter shower,” “Wash your car by hand,” or “Don’t flush after number one.” (Sorry.)

Thinking smaller doesn’t mean the goal is not worthwhile. My daughter was taking a summer course at Harvard about writing short stories. When she called home, I would ask about the day’s lesson. Up until then, I had written only nonfiction, plus one screenplay when I was in graduate school. An educational opportunity presented itself; I was learning how to write a short story, gleaning information from my daughter. My goal: As a creative break at lunchtime, I would try to write one short story. And I’d keep at it until it worked. One. Short. Story. At. Lunch. Since then, literary journals have published my short stories, and two stories have been nominated for awards. But I started small when the opportunity presented itself.

Don’t worry about your ego when setting a goal. As the Cubist writers might have written: a goal is a goal is a goal. Smaller goals are often more manageable.

Be Flexible

If your goal is to create visual art, that’s great. You have a set goal. If your journey seeking inspiration for your art takes you in another promising direction—say it inspires song lyrics—perhaps you can reset your goal. Some creative professionals practice more than one art form—for instance, someone might be a visual artist as well as a songwriter. Go with it. Lean in to pivoting when it’s beneficial.

Your goal might start out in one direction, and your thinking or journey might lead you to another goal. Be open to how things progress. Think back to the creation of Instagram (which started out as a location-based app) or to Lin-Manuel Miranda, who set out to write the first song for a mixtape before finally ending up with the goal of writing a stage musical.

The Three Gs are fluid!

If you set a goal, think of ways that will help you to stick to it. Make a commitment. Your present self might get frustrated along the way, but think of how happy you’ll make your future self if you keep at it. You’ll read more about emotional obstacles in chapter 7.

Think about Responding to a Need

Let’s say you need to solve a problem for your own company or your employer wants you to solve a problem or address a need. Or a family member or friend might ask you for an idea.

If your employer wants to increase sales, manufacture a more accessible product, or streamline a service, you’re facing a fairly set goal. I say “fairly” because the goal your company is setting might not be on target. It’s only after investigation or research that you may realize it’s the wrong goal or a goal that needs to be modified. Ask probing questions to ascertain if the goal is the correct one.

Alternatively, let’s say you want to solve a problem, with no external request. You might have a special or strong need or passion to explore. You’ve heard “Necessity is the mother of invention”—in other words, when a need arises, you must find a new way to do something or create something. For example, Kelu Yu, a doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at National University of Singapore, was inspired to find a new way for her father, who had glaucoma, to examine his eyes at home. Glaucoma is an eye condition affecting approximately 64 million people and requires frequent eye exams at the doctor’s office or hospital. Yu explains, “My father was diagnosed with glaucoma in 2019 and suffered from constant eye pain and headache. This personal experience motivated me to delve deeper into the disease and treatments. . . . The field of glaucoma has lagged far behind in developing a safe, accurate, low cost, at-home eye pressure sensor.”¹¹

With Si Li and David Lee, Kelu Yu created HOPES (Home Eye Pressure E-Skin Sensor), a wearable biomedical device for pain-free, low-cost, at-home intraocular pressure (IOP) testing. Powered by patent-pending sensor technology and artificial intelligence, HOPES is a convenient platform for users to monitor their own IOP.¹²

Crises give rise to urgent needs: war, famine, pandemic, tsunami, and other acts of nature often prompt architects, scientists, physicians, biotech companies, and industrial designers to rethink or set new immediate goals.

Ways of Finding Goals

I would bet Sal Khan was content at his hedge fund job when he began remotely tutoring his cousin, Nadia, who was struggling with unit conversion in her math class. “This ‘Swiss-cheese’ gap [my emphasis] in her knowledge was not allowing her to be placed in the more advanced math track,” states the Khan Academy website.¹³ Nadia’s improved math skills and the interest and demand by other family members for Khan’s math tutorials led Khan to a career goal he had not anticipated. Khan’s is a wonderful story of how a goal presents itself when you see a worthwhile gap or gap + gain, even a “Swiss-cheese” gap. But it’s just one of many ways to find your goal. Here is a roundup of discussed techniques and more:

•Notice a gap. Or a gain, a research finding, a situation, or a gap + a gain presents itself (as it did for Khan), and you grab an opportunity.

•See what pops into your head. In a single moment, you’re conscious of the spark or seed of a goal, when you realize what could be an idea.

•Challenge the status quo. Employ unconventional thinking. Go against prevailing conventions.

•Follow a passion. Form a goal out of love for a subject, activity, or a combo of things.

•Give a goal time to take shape. You further explore a subject or options to guide the goal. Allow enough time for your goal to hatch.

•Be open to serendipity. You stumble onto a goal through observation, curiosity, or conversation.

•Improvise until you find it. You explore a general direction and figure out a goal on that journey. You discover it.

•Change course. After looking at data or thinking about a goal, you realize it might not be the right time for this goal and you pivot or look for a different goal to emerge.

•Consider not telling others about your goal. This seems counterintuitive, but not confiding in others can help you maintain focus, avoid the doubt associated with naysaying, and keep the “that won’t work” comments at bay to free you to ideate.

•Push past your first goal. Part of the process is to always ask yourself, “What else have you got?” Can you push your thinking past your first thought? In retrospect, your first thought might be fantastic. That happens. Best practice, however, says to push past it to find an idea that’s truly worthwhile.

•Push better. Determine the gap and gain. Bring on the passion.

After completing this chapter, here are your action steps:

Think about how the Three Gs can help you unlock an idea, crystallize an idea, or amplify your idea. Answer these questions to get going:

•If you’re excited about doing something, do you see an urgent need or a desire for it?

•Have you challenged the status quo? (Should you?) What would be disruptive to current systems?

•What would be the wrong goals to pursue?

•Where could your passions lead you? To a goal? A gap? A gain?

Ask “What if . . . ?” Asking what-if questions pushes you to imagine or create. They invite you to speculate beyond your own experience, to wonder what something might be like if . . .

And it’s a helpful tool for forming a goal if you don’t have one at the start. You’ll recall the example in chapter 2, when Moty Avisar and Alon Geri, Israeli fighter pilots and cofounders of Surgical Theater, asked themselves, “What if surgeons could train like fighter pilots, previewing their surgical procedures like fighter pilots pre-flying their mission?”

My second-favorite prompt is “If only . . .” This phrase gives you the freedom to talk about something you want to happen or be true. If only I could record my thoughts without writing or speaking. If only there were digital twins, second selves of people, who could survive with people’s ideas and knowledge intact forever.

The value of these types of questions or prompts is that you’re speculating on a possibility beyond your own experience.