I’ve heard the argument that goals are overrated. Forget the goal. Focus on the process. Build systems. Raise your standards.
I understand the idea behind it, but I’m not ready to throw goals away.
Goals are important because they tell us where we want to go; they give us direction. If a high school basketball player tells me his goal is to become a professional basketball player, that goal matters. He has identified something important enough to pursue. Research gives us good reason to take goals seriously too. Decades of goal-setting research have found that well-designed goals can direct attention, increase effort, and improve persistence and performance.¹
But after the player tells me he wants to become a professional basketball player, I’m going to ask him another question: Okay, what requirements do you need to hit to get there?
That’s where the conversation gets more interesting.
He needs to make his high school team first. Then he needs to become a great teammate from the bench before earning a spot in the rotation. From there, the next step is becoming a starter, then an impactful starter, then one of the better players in his area, his district, his state, his region. Eventually, he needs to earn an opportunity to play in college, where the process begins again.
I think of those as benchmarks. They give him ways to evaluate whether he’s progressing toward the larger goal. But none of those things happen simply because he wants them to happen. There’s still today. What is he going to do today?
That’s where standards enter the conversation.
A Goal Tells Me What You Think
When I started thinking about the difference between goals and standards, I eventually came to a pretty simple way of describing it: A goal tells me what you think. A standard tells me what you do.
I don’t mean that dismissively because thinking and saying what you want matters. In fact, I think we have to verbalize it first. We have to identify the destination before we can start figuring out what might be required to get there.
Research actually complicates the popular idea that we should stop focusing on goals. Specific, challenging goals have repeatedly been associated with better performance than vague instructions to simply “do your best,” although their effectiveness depends on things like commitment, feedback, ability, and the complexity of the task.¹ Research in sport also suggests that goal setting can improve performance, with different kinds of goals serving different purposes.²
So, I don’t think the problem is having goals. The problem is thinking the goal does more work than it actually does.
Wanting to become a professional basketball player doesn’t get you into the gym. Wanting to win a state championship doesn’t make a team consistently communicate. Wanting to become healthier doesn’t make you exercise, eat well, or get enough sleep. Eventually, intention has to become behavior.
There’s an entire body of research around this problem. Psychologists sometimes describe it as the gap between intention and action. We can genuinely intend to do something and still fail to do it. Research on what are called implementation intentions has found that people are more likely to follow through when they move beyond the goal and establish more concrete plans for when, where, and how they’ll act.³
That makes sense to me because it gets at something I’ve believed for a long time: don’t just say it, do it. Consistently.
Goals, Benchmarks, and Standards
There are three different questions worth asking whenever we’re pursuing something that matters. Where are we trying to go? How will we know whether we’re getting closer? And how are we committed to executing while we pursue it?
The first question gives us the goal. The second gives us benchmarks. The third gives us standards.
I want to be careful here because standards isn’t some scientific category I’m trying to insert into established goal-setting research. Sport psychology already distinguishes among outcome, performance, and process goals, and there is some overlap between those ideas and what I’m describing.² This is simply a framework that makes sense to me when I think about how people actually compete.
Take the player who wants to become a professional. His goal might be years away, and parts of achieving it are outside his control. He can’t guarantee that a college coach will recruit him or that a professional team will eventually offer him a contract. But there are things he can control much more directly. How consistently does he work on his skills? How does he condition his body? How does he eat and recover? How does he respond to coaching? What kind of teammate is he when he isn’t playing? What does he do when nobody is watching?
Everybody wants to be the starter, but what is your standard when you’re the twelfth player on the bench? Can you become the best cheerleader on the team? Can you pay attention, encourage your teammates, and prepare as if your opportunity is coming even when you have no idea whether it actually is?
The role may change without requiring the standard to change with it.
Saying You Want a Championship Is the Easy Part
I was the Director of Basketball Ops and an assistant coach for a very talented high school team that wanted to win a state championship. We were good enough to make the state Final Four in back-to-back years, so this isn’t a story about a bad team setting an unrealistic goal. We were successful.
But there were things I thought were missing. Our communication wasn’t consistent enough during practices or games, and we relied too heavily on the head coach for leadership and accountability instead of developing enough of it among the players themselves.
I’ve always believed that good teams are led by coaches, while great teams are led by players. I don’t present that as some scientific law. It’s a coaching belief I’ve developed through experience. Research on athlete leadership does support the broader idea that leadership within the player group can contribute to things such as cohesion, confidence, team identity, and the way teams function.⁴
Looking back, I can’t tell you that inconsistent player leadership is why we didn’t win the state championship. Basketball isn’t that simple, and neither is research. There are too many variables in competition to point to one thing and declare it the reason. What I can say is that I saw a gap between what we said we wanted and some of the behaviors I believed pursuing that goal required.
If a team tells me, “Our goal is to win a state championship,” I’m going to want to know what that actually means. What needs to happen for us to give ourselves the best opportunity to achieve it? How will we hold each other accountable to doing those things? Are we just going to talk the talk, or are we going to walk the walk?
Doing is better than saying, but first, you have to say what you’re going to do.
Five Fingers Become One Fist
Standards get more complicated when we’re talking about teams because teams are made up of individuals. A coach can establish a standard. A team can agree on a standard. An organization can put a standard on a wall. Eventually, though, an individual has to execute it.
That’s why I think belief in the goal matters. If I don’t believe in what we’re trying to accomplish, I’m probably going to have a difficult time consistently committing to everything required to get there. Research on self-endorsed goals points in a similar direction: when goals align more closely with a person’s interests and values, people tend to sustain more effort toward them.⁵
I sometimes think about a basketball team as five fingers becoming one fist. There are five different people on the court with different personalities, strengths, weaknesses, experiences, and ways of seeing the game. Somehow those five individuals have to become one team.
That doesn’t mean everyone has to think identically or approach everything the same way. If someone’s way of doing something conflicts with the team’s, maybe the first response should be communication. Where do we agree? Where do we actually disagree? Is there another way to approach this that still gets us where we’re trying to go?
That distinction has become increasingly important to me as I’ve thought about standards. Maybe the standard can remain consistent while the method changes.
The Standard Can Stay While the Method Changes
Suppose I establish a standard that I’m going to take care of my health. At 25, that might mean training a certain way six days a week. I may have more energy, as well as recover and respond to training differently.
At 45? As they say in sports sometimes, Father Time is undefeated.
My body may give me different information. My responsibilities may be different. What we know about training and recovery may be different. Maybe four intelligently designed training days are better for me now than six. Did I lower my standard?
I don’t think so.
If the standard is to take care of my health, blindly continuing the exact same training program simply because that’s what I did at 25 might actually move me away from the standard. The method changed because the information changed. That’s different from lowering the standard simply because meeting it became inconvenient.
This distinction matters to me because of a phrase that has become central to MindCompete: The Standard Never Changes. The more I think about that phrase, the less I think it means doing the exact same thing forever. Methods should change. Strategies should change. Information changes, and we change. Self-awareness, which we explored in Foundation #02, should help us recognize when what we’re doing is no longer producing what we thought it would.
“The Standard Never Changes” isn’t a commitment to rigidity. It’s a commitment to the underlying principle or level of behavior we’ve decided matters, while remaining willing to adapt how we live up to it. The standard remains. The method adapts.
There’s an important qualification here, though. Sometimes what we originally called a standard may simply have been wrong. We learn things. Circumstances change. We discover that something we believed was helping us is actually hurting us. I don’t think intellectual stubbornness should be confused with maintaining a standard.
If better information tells us we were wrong, we should be willing to reconsider what we were doing. The question is whether we’re changing because we’ve learned something or changing because maintaining the standard became uncomfortable.
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
What Happens When You Miss the Standard?
Because you will. I will too.
If our definition of having standards requires meeting them perfectly every time, we’re eventually going to have a problem. Maybe you didn’t prepare well enough. Maybe you lost your composure. Maybe you weren’t the teammate you expect yourself to be. Maybe you didn’t communicate. Maybe you knew what you should do and didn’t do it anyway.
The most important time when you make a mistake isn’t actually when you make the mistake, it’s what you do right after. What happens next matters.
For me, the first step is acknowledging it. If the standard involves other people, especially a team, sometimes that acknowledgement needs to happen publicly. Don’t just admit it quietly to yourself. Tell the people who were affected that you didn’t meet the standard, then become solutions-based. What happened? What do we know? What are we going to do about it? How do we get back on track?
Missing the standard doesn’t mean we lower it until our behavior qualifies. The standard doesn’t change because we failed to meet it. Our response has to change so we can get back to it.
That doesn’t mean circumstances don’t matter – injury, fatigue, grief, illness, Life – all of that stuff can hit us and become adversities we have to overcome. As we discussed in Foundation #01, competing involves bringing the best we have available in that moment. There’s a difference between an explanation and an excuse. Circumstances can help us understand why we fell short without eliminating our responsibility for deciding what we’re going to do next.
When High Standards Work Against Us
This is where I think the conversation about standards can go wrong.
Suppose someone trains through an injury and says, “That’s just my standard.” Is it? If continuing to train prevents recovery, reduces performance, and potentially keeps you injured longer, maybe what you’re defending isn’t the standard. Maybe you’re defending a method that no longer serves you.
Or maybe someone makes a mistake and spends the next three days obsessing over it. Is that evidence of high standards? Maybe, but what are you doing with the information?
Research on perfectionism in sport is interesting here because it doesn’t support the simple idea that expecting a lot from yourself is inherently bad. Researchers often distinguish between striving toward very high standards and the more self-critical side of perfectionism involving excessive concern over mistakes and perceived shortcomings. The relationship with performance is complicated, but recent research suggests that high striving can coexist with strong performance, particularly when those perfectionistic concerns are lower.⁶
That distinction makes sense to me. The line isn’t necessarily whether you expect a lot from yourself. The line may be what happens when you discover you didn’t meet the expectation.
Do you learn and adapt? Do you execute and move forward? Or do you stay stuck?
We’ve already encountered versions of this question in the first two Foundations. What do I know, and what am I going to do with what I know? A mistake gives you information. Missing a standard gives you information. Obsessing over that information without responding to it doesn’t necessarily move you any closer to the standard.
At some point, you have to act. Whether the next action turns out well or badly, at least you’re moving forward and creating new information to learn from.
Standards Aren’t Only About Performance
When we talk about standards in sport, it’s easy to make everything about work: train harder, prepare better, be more disciplined, compete. Those things matter to me, but some of the standards I care about most have nothing to do with a scoreboard.
One of mine is simple: always be kind.
If I have an opportunity to help someone, I want to help. If I can’t help them beyond what I’m capable of doing, I want to be honest about that and, when I can, point them toward someone or something that might help them further. Sometimes kindness is telling a basketball player, “Great job,” because maybe he thinks he’s stinking up the court and needs somebody else to help him see he’s actually doing really well. Sometimes kindness is Time. Someone might need to vent, and maybe they don’t need me to solve anything. Maybe what they want is for another human being to sit there and listen.
Another standard I have is to let the people I love know how I feel about them. When I say goodbye to close friends or family, I tell them I love them because I may not get another opportunity. I don’t want to rely on they know. I want them to know because I told them.
Those are standards too, and I think that’s important because competitive performance can’t only be about what we accomplish. Standards can also govern the person we choose to be while we’re trying to accomplish it.
Caring Is a Standard Too
If I had to identify one of the primary standards I ask of players and coaches, it might simply be this: care. Show yourself and your teammates that what we’re doing actually matters to you. Care enough to prepare, communicate, hold someone accountable, and be held accountable yourself. Care enough to do your best to hit the benchmarks and meet the standards we’ve agreed will give us an opportunity to reach the goal.
Of course, even caring can become complicated. A player gets fouled, makes a difficult basket, gets fired up, and starts talking junk to the opponent. Does he care? Absolutely. Maybe too much in that particular moment.
The emotion itself isn’t necessarily the problem. We talked about that in Foundation #02. The question is what he does with it. Passion still needs direction. Caring about the goal doesn’t give us permission to abandon the standards we’re using to pursue it.
In fact, maybe a standard tells us the most about ourselves when following it becomes difficult. It’s easy to say sportsmanship matters before the game. What happens immediately after somebody fouls you? It’s easy to say communication matters when everything is going well. What happens when you’re losing? It’s easy to say you’re a great teammate when you’re starting. What happens when the coach puts you on the bench?
That’s when the standard has an opportunity to become visible.
So, What’s the Difference Between Goals and Standards?
I am less interested in choosing between goals and standards. I think we need both, and I think benchmarks have a place in the middle.
The goal tells us where we’re trying to go. The benchmarks help us understand whether we’re getting closer. The standards govern how we’ve committed to operating along the way.
The goal of becoming a professional basketball player can matter deeply, and the benchmark of making the varsity team can tell you something about your progress. But neither one gets you out of bed tomorrow morning. Neither determines how you practice, how you respond when the coach doesn’t play you, or whether you encourage the teammate who got the minutes you wanted.
You do.
That’s why I keep coming back to the simplest version of this idea: A goal tells me what you think. A standard tells me what you do.
Say what you want. Figure out what it requires. Establish the standards that give you the best opportunity to get there, then live them consistently. And when you inevitably fall short, acknowledge it, learn from it, respond, and get back to work.
Because the method may change. The circumstances may change. You may change. But once you’ve decided what truly matters and how you’re committed to showing up for it, The Standard Never Changes.
Notes & Further Reading
1. Locke, Edwin A., and Gary P. Latham. “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey.” American Psychologist, 2002.
A major review of decades of goal-setting research. Locke and Latham examine how specific and challenging goals can influence attention, effort, persistence, and performance, while also discussing factors such as commitment, feedback, ability, and task complexity that affect whether goals actually work.
Read the research
2. Williamson, Oliver, et al. “The Performance and Psychological Effects of Goal Setting in Sport: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.” International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology.
This review examines goal setting specifically within sport, including the different roles that outcome, performance, and process goals can play. It provides useful context for thinking about the relationship between a larger destination and the behaviors athletes use to pursue it.
Read the research
3. Gollwitzer, Peter M., and Paschal Sheeran. “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Effects and Processes.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006.
This research explores the gap between intending to do something and actually doing it. Across 94 independent tests, the researchers found that creating specific plans for when, where, and how to act can significantly improve goal attainment. That distinction helps explain why identifying a goal alone doesn’t guarantee the behaviors necessary to pursue it.
Read the research
4. Fransen, Katrien, et al. Research on athlete leadership and shared leadership in sports teams.
Research into athlete leadership suggests that leadership emerging from within the player group can influence important aspects of team functioning, including cohesion, confidence, team identification, and the motivational environment. My belief that “good teams are led by coaches, while great teams are led by players” is a coaching philosophy rather than a scientific rule, but this research helps explain why leadership within the team itself can matter.
Explore the research
5. Sheldon, Kennon M., and Andrew J. Elliot. “Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999.
Sheldon and Elliot explored what happens when the goals people pursue are more closely aligned with their own interests and values. Their findings help support the idea that believing in and personally connecting with a goal can influence the effort people are willing to sustain in pursuing it.
Read the research
6. Kim, Hyunsoo, Daniel J. Madigan, and Andrew P. Hill. “Multidimensional Perfectionism and Sport Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.” International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2025.
This review helps complicate the idea that holding yourself to high standards is inherently unhealthy. The researchers distinguish between perfectionistic strivings and perfectionistic concerns, finding that striving toward very high standards can relate positively to sport performance, particularly when excessive concern over mistakes and shortcomings is lower.
Read the research