When an archer aims she doesn’t keep her eye on the target. She knows the target is there, but she sees it vaguely, or sometimes not at all. The point of aim is always closer than the target.

Hitting the target is determined by how she aims, not by the fact that she’s shooting for it.

So much of our business practice is focused on some future outcome, a key performance indicator, a better bottom line, another successful round of funding, more subscribers, an uptick in the number of orders—on the moment that we hit the target. But we don’t hit targets because we continually focus on them, we know the target is there but the target is not the focus. The focus is on how we aim, on doing the right thing today and then building on that, by doing it over and over again.

Your target is not some distant outcome or a metric of tomorrow, your target is how you’re aiming right now.

Image by Max Lim.