What Are Long-Term Goals? Examples and How to Set Them

We have all been there—swamped by deadlines and to-dos, only to lose sight of the bigger picture. For many of us, typical work days mean focusing on whatever is literally right in front of us, thinking on our feet, and juggling ad hoc requests. But when every single day is just more of the same, with no clear goals to aim for, it’s about time we start to feel unmotivated, directionless, and, ultimately, disengaged.

This is why it’s important to set long-term goals, as they can inform the projects you undertake, the skills you wish to build, and the decisions you will eventually make as you progress in your career.

Let’s explore what long-term goals are, their different types, examples, and how to set and achieve them.

Long-Term Goals, Defined.

Long-term goals are goals you set to achieve over time. Unlike short-term goals, they rely on a series of checkpoints or milestones that help you monitor progress and stay on track.

When setting long-term goals, you get to determine what “long-term” really means to you, as well as the milestones you see fit, in a way that makes those goals realistic to accomplish.

Before you even begin to really dive into long-term goals, make sure you understand the time frame that you are supposed to be working with. From there, explore the type of goals and subgoals you need to create, ways you can benchmark progress, and who might be necessary to help you achieve those goals.

It’s important to understand that long-term goals are the bigger goals you want for the future, which naturally take notably longer to achieve because they are significantly loftier and more complex. To effectively achieve them, long-term goals require:

• Hard work
• Careful planning
• Accountability
• Perseverance

There is a saying that is well-suited to anyone who wants to achieve their long-term goals: “Keep your eyes on the prize.” How you structure your long-term goals and your approach to achieving them will be determined in no small part by what that “prize” consists of, such as better health or education, career advancement, improved finances, stronger relationships, etc.

Long-term goals are basically your delayed gratification outcome after months or years of sustained hard work and focus, either alone or with the help of a mentor. They may seem too high and unreachable at first. But learning how to turn dreams into goals is the start of a significant transformation that can change your life.

Why Is It Important to Set Long-Term Goals?

Let’s keep it simple: If you don’t set goals, you can’t effectively identify where you need to go and what steps you need to take to get there.

Think of long-term goals like planning a cross-country road trip. Let’s say you are starting from Washington, D.C., and headed to sunny San Diego, California. That’s a 39-hour road trip. You can’t do it in one day. So you set goals (waypoints) along the route for everything you need to do to make that kind of trip physically and economically possible, such as rest stops, gas stops, food stops, hotel stays, and even tolls.

That cross-country trip is a long-term goal because of the precise reason we just mentioned: it’s literally not possible to do it in one day, even without stopping. You probably need to put in six 8-hour days for a drive like that.

With that in mind, your long-term goals are similar. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by them until you realize they are just like a cross-country road trip. Since they are physically impossible to complete in a day, you don’t stress that you can’t make it there in 5 minutes. Instead, you examine the route, plan out stops and progress markers, and then make sure you have the help you need to get there safely.

Setting goals, especially long-term ones, lets you cut your plans into smaller pieces of achievable, concrete objectives that you can work with intention. You can call these subgoals or even short-term goals.

Apart from helping you achieve bigger things, setting long-term goals also allows you to prioritize what you need to do and decide for yourself what success looks like for you.

Examples of Long-Term Goals

Each person is unique. Thus, no two people have exactly the same goals, especially in the long term. While you may have some similarities with others, your dreams for yourself, your personal life, your professional life, your family, thoughts, and aspirations are unique to you. However, there are common categories that can define or align with your long-term goals, including:

1. Personal goals

Long-term personal goals refer to the personal life (non-work) achievements that you want to accomplish. Note the emphasis here on non-work. While some of your personal goals may be specific to career goals, it’s important to have goals that are not so intertwined with your career.

Nearly 80% of working adults have experienced workplace burnout. Finding a better work-life balance helps prevent burnout. A good starting point is to have personal goals that you can focus on that are not tied to your career.

Some examples of long-term personal goals include:

• Develop a positive mindset and self-confidence
• Adopt a healthy diet, stick to a fitness routine, or run a marathon
• Manage emotions and practice self-regulation
• Achieve a healthy work-life balance and manage stress
• Master a new skill, e.g., crocheting, baking, or perhaps artisanal pencil sharpening!
• Improve interpersonal skills
• Learn a foreign language
• Expand your social circle, meet new people
• Find a life partner
• Connect with family members and improve family relationships
• Go on a personal retreat
• Travel to your dream country/destination

Consider finding spaces where you can talk to others about these goals. Although disconnecting personal goals from work is important, affinity spaces like Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are perfect for connecting with like-minded colleagues to unwind, share, find a mentor, and locate accountability toward your personal goals.

2. Career goals

Long-term career goals are professional achievements you hope to attain or reach in the future. These are typically related to your professional standing, job positions, career transitions, or desired management and/or leadership positions. It could also mean starting your own business or becoming your own boss. 

Make sure to identify and align your long-term professional goals with your overall career plan.

Some examples of long-term career goals include:

• Find what you really love to do for your career
• Seek and listen intently for performance feedback
• Develop new skills for the job or your career path
• Find career mentors
• Discover a new market to capitalize on in your industry
• Obtain a professional certification
• Become a thought leader in your industry
• Have your own business/company and be your own boss
• Expand professional network
• Become a better leader, mentor
• Acquire more soft skills
• Master public speaking
• Win awards and recognition in your industry
• Build a successful career in your industry
• Join and complete a leadership development course

Many career goals require quite a bit of upskilling or reskilling to accomplish. As a result, part of the process for achieving these goals will likely mean tapping into educational resources, such as courses, coaches, or workplace mentoring programs.

3. Financial goals

With so many people living paycheck to paycheck these days, setting financial goals simply makes sense. Financial improvements let you save and purchase things that you always needed and wanted, like housing, a car, entertainment, travel, or insurance. Quite often, the end goal isn’t just money but financial freedom and peace of mind.

Some examples of long-term financial goals include:

• Become financially independent, maximize earning potential
• Fix and improve credit score, pay off credit card debt, pay off a mortgage
• Save more money for your emergency fund and have enough money to buy the things you need and want
• Save for retirement
• Ensure children’s education
• Have multiple passive income streams
• Become a millionaire (or billionaire even!)

You can use any of these examples of long-term goals as a starting point when developing ideas for your own.

How Do I Find or Set My Long-Term Goals?

Are your goals personal, professional, or financial? Do you already have a list? There are some good ways to begin building your long-term goals. These include the following items:

Visualize

Long-term goal setting really does start with visualizing your ideal future and answering the question, “where do you want to go from here?”

To do this, you have to learn how to see yourself in the coming years in a way that is relevant to your dreams, goals, and, basically, things and aspects in life that you want to achieve—this is the power of visualization.

Visualization means creating mental images of what you desire in the future. From there, you can work backward and determine the necessary steps and the direction you need to take to turn your visualized images into reality.

Be S.M.A.R.T

Your long-term goals must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Sensitive (SMART). These are also known as SMART goals. The long-term goals examples provided here are good examples of this strategy in goal setting.

• Specific: Be very specific in what exactly you want to achieve, and add as many details as possible. Each person has their own definition or idea of success, which stems from their own goals and dreams. What exactly do you need to accomplish? Why is this goal important for you?

• Measurable: Decide how you are going to measure and keep track of your progress. All long-term goals may seem daunting and difficult, but if you break them down into smaller, measurable steps, you can easily assess your progress and recognize how far you need to go to achieve the ultimate goal. If you’re working on personal goals, measuring can be hard. You will need to devise a system that helps you determine what about that goal is even measurable at all. Then, you will need to create a system for measuring and tracking those goals. If you are working on professional goals, your organization or mentor may have strategies that you can use to measure. And if you are even luckier, your organization may have already invested in tools that help you measure your progress toward meeting your professional goals.

• Achievable: It is completely normal to aim for the biggest goals or hardest ones. However, what is the point of setting these goals if you have not identified the means and necessary steps to achieve them in the first place? The more you understand what it takes to achieve your goals, the better your chances are of achieving them.

• Realistic: Is your goal necessary and relevant to your present situation? Will it put your life in a better place? Having realistic goals will keep you motivated, no matter how challenging they may be. This is where being specific and very detailed comes in handy. The better you understand your goal, the more you can achieve it. When setting long-term goals, make sure you consider all the things you need to do, learn, and achieve to get to that point. Moreover, you need to envision the journey and foresee the possible challenges and obstacles that will get your way. Understanding these things will help you come up with a better plan. 

• Time-Bound: What is the point of having goals if you are not committed to pursuing them? One way to hold yourself accountable in working towards your goals is to set a timetable for it or even a deadline. Putting a timetable for your long-term goals, be it months or years, forces you to stay on the grind and keep track of the things you need to do. If your goal is important enough for you, you will find ways to work on it day in and day out. And, of course, be conscious of those timelines. There are some goals that must be completed within a certain amount of time, so prioritize and triage tasks as needed.

However, there are other goal-setting formats, especially if you are working on professional goals within a mentoring relationship. For something like that, we recommend REAL goals instead. These are the goals that are:

• Relevant: Indicate why it is important and worthwhile.
• Experimental: Imply development activity that will lead to greater insight.
• Aspirational: Identify an area of desired development.
• Learning-based: Express outcomes that are focused on gaining capability.

The boon here is that you often get to choose your own goal-setting format. Still, picking the right format can impact how successful you are in achieving your goals in the time you’ve given yourself.

How to Achieve Your Long-Term Goals

So, how exactly do you achieve your personal and professional goals? There is no single best answer, but you will find each of the following is both common sense and easy enough to start.

1. Prioritize your long-term goals

Now that you have set long-term goals, it is time to work on them. You need to prioritize goals so it creates a sense of urgency in you to pursue. If you use the SMART goals approach, you hopefully have achievable goals within realistic timelines. This way, you have no excuse not to act on those goals when you can.

Action step: To help you prioritize your goals, write them down. Put your action plan in writing and have a vision board of your long-term goal in your room or desk. Highlight the ones that are extremely important to you, and put a deadline on yourself to achieve those goals.

2. Break your long-term goals into multiple short-term goals

Short-term goals are like milestones to get you from one step to another. Achieving long-term goals is a marathon, not a quick 100-meter sprint. What you do from point A to point B, C to D, and so on, will all contribute to your success when you set long-term goals.

Looking at your long-term goals can be overwhelming. If you set the mark high, your goals can look intimidating. But if you break them down into smaller, achievable goals, it gives you more confidence to tackle them.

Action step: To set your long-term goals, write them all down into smaller, actionable steps. Have a project plan and try to break them down into a timeline. Again, be specific in what you want to achieve in a week, a month, six months, a year, two years, three years, etc.

From there, you can even break down your short-term goals even further into daily steps. Decide on which things to focus on each day and try to achieve your daily goals as often as possible. These steps may seem small, but they are the pieces of the whole puzzle. Meaning they are all important and necessary to complete the whole thing.

3. Plan

Failure to plan and planning to fail. For your work to be effective, it should be connected to your day-to-day work. That means you need a plan.

Action step: When it comes to setting long-term goals, having a concrete plan will help you realize what you need to do and accomplish, the skills and knowledge you need to have, and help you identify which ones to prioritize. Again, put a timetable of your short-term goals and stick to them.

4. Share it with others

One good technique to hold yourself accountable is to share your long-term goals with others. This can be your parents, friends, colleagues, or the workplace mentors you communicate with regularly.

Action step: Sharing your goals with someone who cares about you and wants you to succeed is neither bragging nor oversharing. Sharing your goals out loud with someone you trust can inspire you to take action and actually do the things you need to do to achieve those goals. Your friends and family may also check in on you and give you their words of encouragement and support, which can help you push through any challenges and obstacles.

You can also ask the person you share your goals with to hold you accountable and put you on notice to help keep you on the right track.

5. Identify challenges along the way

Challenges will always be there, and problems are almost always inevitable. The key to getting through them is to foresee them, anticipate them, and have a concrete plan on how you are going to tackle them should they arise.

Action step: Identify each challenge associated with each long-term goal you have set. As you break out your long-term goals into short-term goals that can be more easily achieved, think through potential roadblocks and, importantly, write them down.

6. Be persistent, but learn to adapt to change

The plans you have set to accomplish your goals can change in an instant. That doesn’t mean going into panic mode. Instead, analyze the situation, identify the problems, and navigate around those changes.

Action step: Be amenable to changing your plans as the need arises. Some steps of the process may be necessary, but, more often than not, there are multiple ways to accomplish any goal you have set for yourself. Once unexpected issues do arise, calmly plan out how to change course without deeply impacting progress, and speak to someone whose experience can make them a great mentor for your situation.

7. Don’t be afraid to fail

Many people go by the mantra, “fall seven times, stand up eight.” Essentially, it is completely ok to fail as long as you succeed more times than you do.

As said earlier, there will be challenges and obstacles along the way, and things will not always go your way. It is easy to feel motivated when you are winning, but it is in losing that you should be even more motivated. You will fail a few times, but what is important is you learn from your mistakes and use them to motivate you to even push harder forward.

Action step: Build a support network around yourself. Create strategies for resolving issues. Learn how to forgive yourself and cope with failure in a healthy way.

Big Things Start Small.

Setting long-term goals is an undeniable motivator. However, it can be a demotivator if those goals seem too lofty or unachievable. To that end, make sure you put up many short-term goals that will help motivate you to keep going.

These short-term goals don’t always have to be connected to your long-term goals. Consider them the “low-hanging fruit” of goal setting. Just as you knock out easy projects in your work day first to clear your to-do list as a motivator, setting and achieving key short-term goals will keep you inspired to take on the challenges of those long-term ones.

That’s why we regularly recommend a mentor leader, as well. They tend to have the kind of knowledge and experience necessary to get past roadblocks and can even help you decide on what goals (both short-term and long-term) make the most sense.

Your next step as a mentee? Asking the right questions

Having a mentor is the single best way to set and achieve your long-term goals. Book a demo to learn more about what mentoring programs can do!