50/50 Goals: Turning Short-Term Failures into Long-Term Wins

The concept of 50/50 goals is that 50% of a goal’s success is based on achieving the quantifiable outcome and 50% is based on identifying a lesson or skill that you can apply to your business to improve results in the long run.

For example, you set a goal to syndicate five deals this year, but you only complete three. If 100% of your success is tied to completing five deals, then you’ve failed. You feel discouraged and let down. Maybe you even drop out of the investment game altogether.

However, if 50% of your goal is completing five deals and 50% is the takeaways you can apply to your business moving forward, you are successful, or at least “feel” successful. By going through the entire process of closing three deals, the experience you gained, the lessons you learned, and the new skills adopted will have a positive effect on the business one, five, and 10 years down the road.

Since we are committed to long-term success and thinking in terms of decades and not years, these skills and lessons can be more important than the quantifiable result, especially in your early years. It’s like the compound interest effect, but instead of money, it’s skills. If you learn a skill in year one, it’s a part of your repertoire indefinitely.

For example, you create a podcast and your goal is to record a podcast once a week for a year. But at the end of the year, you only recorded 40. Again, if your success is 100% dependent on recording 52 podcast episodes, you failed. However, with the 50/50 goals concept, all the skills you obtained and the relationships created account for 50% of your success, and will likely have a greater long-term impact on both your podcast and your business than not having launched the podcast at all.

Back to the first example — if you fail to complete your five syndication deals, but on your third deal, you meet a five-star property management company, that additional team member may earn you more money in the long run than you would have made in those two extra deals without finding the manager.

This concept allows you to approach situations with a “glass half-full” mindset rather than a “glass half-empty” mindset. Two people who set the same goal and achieve the same quantifiable outcome (e.g., three syndication deals in one year instead of five) can feel the exact opposite.

The individual whose success is 100% dependent on completing five deals will feel awful. Whereas the individual whose success is 50% dependent on completing five deals and 50% dependent on identifying skills to apply moving forward will identify what they did right, what they did wrong, what they need to do more of, and what they need to do less of, and will feel motivated going into the next year.

Reframe the way you look at goals. No longer think of success as being 100% dependent on reaching a specific outcome. Instead, cut that in half and focus the other 50% on identifying systems, skills, techniques, or lessons learned from the process of striving for a specific outcome.