Goals That Require Someone Else To Say Yes

Some goals can be reached through your own actions. Others require a decision from someone else, and the difference changes what effort can accomplish.

Effort and outcome come apart

A goal you control has a reliable relationship between work and result. More preparation produces a better outcome in a predictable way.

A goal requiring approval does not. The decision is made by someone weighing considerations that include your work and are not limited to it.

Effort still matters, but it changes the probability rather than determining the result, and the distinction is easy to lose while working hard.

The comparison is invisible

Selection decisions are comparative. A candidate, a submission or a proposal is judged against others that are not visible to the person being judged.

This means feedback about a rejection frequently cannot be given accurately, because the reason was often the alternative rather than the submission.

People routinely interpret this as a verdict on quality, which is available and wrong more often than not.

Volume behaves differently here

For goals under your control, concentrated effort on a single attempt is usually correct.

Where each attempt is a separate decision by a different party, the number of attempts matters as much as the quality of any one.

Treating a selection goal like a controlled one produces a single perfected attempt where several good ones would have served better.

The difference is not carelessness. A larger number of attempts spreads the outcome across several independent decisions rather than staking everything on one person's judgment on one day.

Separate what is being pursued

The useful move is defining the goal as the action rather than the approval: applications submitted, proposals sent, conversations requested.

Those can be completed, tracked and improved, which restores the relationship between effort and progress that the outcome does not provide.

The approvals then function as results rather than as goals, which changes what a bad month means without changing what anyone is actually working toward.

Information is the other lever

Since the decision is made by someone with criteria you cannot see, learning the criteria is often worth more than improving the submission.

That information is usually held informally: what the decision-maker is optimizing for, what the constraints are, what has been chosen before.

This is why access matters in selection processes, and why treating them as pure evaluations of merit leads people to work on the only part they can see.