This concept of the SMART goal was introduced in the November 1981 issue of Management Review "There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and Objectives" by George T. Doran, a consultant and former Director of Corporate Planning for Washington Water Power Company.
A useful way of making goals more powerful is to use the SMART mnemonic. While there are plenty of variants (some of which we've included in parenthesis), SMART usually stands for:
S – Specific (or Significant).
M – Measurable (or Meaningful).
A – Attainable (or Action-Oriented).
R – Relevant (or Rewarding).
T – Time-bound (or Trackable).
How to define a goal?
There are five basic principles of goal definition:
The First - a principle of congruence (goals and values are in perfect harmony with each other). Your values are your deepest beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad, about the important and unimportant. High performance and a great self-esteem are only possible when your goals and values are in perfect harmony with each other. For example, if you set both the goal #1 "Building a career" and the goal #2 "Travel" - at this stage, these two goals are not congruent, since the process of building a career will take you a lot of time and effort and involves training and cyclical activity in an office environment. The goal of "Travel" will distract you from the goal number "Building a career".
The Second - an area which you are perfect/excellent in. Everyone is able to achieve perfection in one thing, perhaps even in a few things. Just find your area of excellence and dedicate yourself to the development of your own talents in this field, and you can realize your full potential. Your job is to find this area, if you have not done it yet. Your area of excellence may be changed with the development of your career, only those who manage to find it can achieve a success. Your area of excellence will invariably be related to such activities, which do you like most and best of all possible. How to find the area which you are perfect in? Example: You need to describe what you like to do, analyze what you can do the best, and think how you can earn on it, and finally create your own business project. Using the following scheme as it mentioned below (Figure 2) you will search for an area of your perfection.
