Big DUMB Goals

It’s the new year, which means it’s time for another article about setting goals. But this one is not like the others. This isn’t about your goals for 2025—it’s about your goals for 2030 or even 2035. This is about setting big DUMB goals.

I’ll start by sharing my origin story as a coach and weave some of that story into the examples throughout the article.

Coaching a world champion

At the ripe old age of 27—when most bowlers are in their prime—I decided that my path lay in coaching. Despite having won a national championship and a few international medals, I quit competitive bowling to pursue something I hoped would be more rewarding: helping others achieve their goals. I applied for and was accepted as an assistant coach on Canada’s national team.

This is where the big DUMB goal part comes in.

I set myself a simple goal: to coach a world champion by the time I was 35. One reason I started coaching so early was my belief that becoming a world-class coach wasn’t something you could achieve by simply stopping bowling, starting to coach, and, boom, suddenly being great. I knew it would take a lot of hard work (and even then, I underestimated it).

And so, with precisely zero international coaching experience and having only coached in a local youth league, I thought to myself, “I’m going to help Canada get to the top of the podium one day.”

Absolute madness. But it happened.

SMART versus DUMB goals

I’ve thought a lot about that journey in recent years, and it made me realize that while SMART goals are helpful in the shorter term, DUMB goals are much better over the long haul. While the familiar SMART acronym stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-oriented (there are a few ...