Tips for Setting Goals, Part 2

If you dream of becoming a profitable sports bettor, one of the first steps is to learn how to set intelligent goals.  You may think that comes later, but if you put off goal setting too long, you risk setting yourself up for failure.  Why?  When all you have are dreams of success, they tend to remain just that - dreams. 

In Tips for Setting Goals, Part 1, I gave some advice for setting your sports betting goals, including:

•           Making sure you actually set goals.

•           Having a combination of short- and long-term goals.

•           Setting S.M.A.R.T. goals.

•           Maintaining some flexibility in the goals that you set.

Now I want to share a few more tips.

1.  Do not be a perfectionist.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make setting goals is setting goals which are just too lofty.  It is admirable to want to be the very best at what you do, but the reality is that you probably won’t be.  And that is okay.  If you demand too much of yourself, you will never measure up, and then you will perceive of yourself as a failure even if you are actually doing quite well.  When that happens, you may feel tempted to quit for no reason.

Remember, even the sharps usually pull in a win percentage under 60%.  That is a lot of imperfection.  If you cannot learn to tolerate that imperfection, you will never allow yourself to succeed.

2.  Set priorities.

When you sit down to think about short and long term goals, you will probably come up with a few of each.  In fact, you could end up coming up with quite a few goals for the near future.  With so many goals, how do you choose where to focus?

The answer is to prioritise, and to do it when you come up with your goals.  You should not put all of them on even footing with each other.  Some goals are going to be more important to pursue than others.  If your short-term goals have the potential to take you in branching directions, you should probably choose one branch to prioritise above the rest.

For example, say that you follow rugby, football, cricket, and basketball on a regular basis.  You dream of becoming a successful punter, and you figure you can utilise your knowledge of all four sports to make that happen.

So that leads to short-term goals of becoming better at betting on all four sports.  The problem is that this may lead you in too many directions at once.  If you widen your breadth that much, you may lack the depth to truly excel with any of the four pathways.

For that reason, it is a smart idea to choose just one or two sports to really focus on.  You can have goals of becoming profitable betting on all four, but you need to choose what to prioritise.  So for now you might want to focus mainly on rugby, and when you start making significant progress with that, you can start focusing more on cricket, and so on.

3.  Set goals for your life in general, not just your betting career.

We all want to be rich, but why do you want to be rich?  That is a question that you need to answer before you can structure your professional life as a punter.

Money is a resource which can help you to accomplish other life goals.  But those goals can vary quite a bit from one person to the next.

Here are some examples of life goals which require money:

• I want enough money that I can start a secondary business or a nonprofit.

• I have another personal project which I wish to finance.

• I want enough money that I can pay for my kids’ college education and leave them an inheritance.

• I want more free time.

• I want to quit my day job and enjoy more autonomy in my life.

You can see how these different goals might influence the goals you set within your sports betting career.  If time is not a concern for example, you might be willing to push yourself day and night to succeed.  But if the whole point of getting rich is to free up time in your day, you would be at cross purposes with yourself if you pushed yourself too far.  When one of your goals intrudes too far on another, you may end up burning out. 

So you need to learn how to balance your goals and priorities as a punter.  If you can do that while keeping your goals concrete and attainable, you can make real progress toward achieving your dreams.