Loony Landings: A Short Story about Goals and Goal Setting …

“No way in hell, buddy, no way in hell. We never went to the freakin’ moon; simply never happened, my friend. The whole thing was rigged. Can’t you remember? We were being owned by the Russians in the Space Race at the time and NASA had to do something mega to put it up to the Reds. So, they made it all up. It was faked. Yup, just like the government always does, they played us like dumb-ass fools.”

This guy is a total quack, how did I end up talking to him? Mike Kelly sat silently and wondered how on earth he had allowed himself to get sucked into this bizarre conversation. He had only come downtown to Molly’s to get a break from the book he was writing … and in the hope that a night out would shift the severe bout of writer’s block he was experiencing. But, if he was honest with himself, it wasn’t all that hard to figure out how this had happened: throwing back at least eight beers in the space of a few hours might have had something to do with the fact that he was now sitting alongside a guy who was practically foaming at the mouth.

And this foamer was not alone either by the sound of things.

“You’re damn right, man,” shouted another guy at the far side of the bar, who obviously had good hearing functionality but seemingly little else going on inside his head. “If we had actually been to the moon then why is it going to take us at least until 2030 to go back? I read somewhere that NASA said they had forgotten how to get there. Forgotten? Hah, that’s a bit rich seeing as we were never actually up there in the first place.”

Mike realised that there was no point in even asking the guy where he heard that. No doubt, it is likely to have come from such a reliable source as the National Enquirer.

“Have you ever heard of the Van Halen radiation belt,” said the first lunar expert, spraying half his mouthful of beer on Mike as he did.

The lunacy around me is really starting to spread now, Mike thought. “You mean, the ‘Van Allen’ radiation belt, is it?” he replied.

“Yup, that’s what I said.”

“Actually, you. . .” There was no point in finishing that sentence, Mike realised. It was probably best just to let him spew some more nonsense; although he was pretty sure that what the guy was about to say would come from way out there in left field.

“To get to the moon, I heard that those guys would have had to pass through that Van Halen belt thingy. Only one slight problem though, bud, if astronauts had actually travelled through it, they would have been fried – like pieces of KFC - so there’s no way in hell we could have sent them through it twice in a tin can and got them back home safely. It was all a massive hoax.”

The guy took a gulp of beer before continuing.

“Where have you been for the past couple of decades? Sure, Kissinger even admitted that the whole thing was faked: he said that Stanley Kubrick filmed the ‘moon landings’ in a specially designed studio. You can find out all about it on the web, if you don’t believe me.”

He certainly didn’t disappoint, Mike thought. Never mind left field, that came from a different ball park entirely. If this guy wasn’t so scary, he might actually be funny.

“Yea,” says yet another guy joining in as the madness continued to seep around the bar, “you can tell the Apollo landings were phony just by looking at the photographs or the video. Kubrick did a lousy job, got the lighting angles all wrong. Look, in one shot, you can actually see the American flag flapping away in the breeze, as if there was any wind on the moon. Some idiot must have left a door open in the studio or something. Plus, didn’t you hear that people watching it ‘live’ in Australia said they saw one of the astronauts kick a coke bottle when he walked across the moon?

“What’s more, have you seen the press conference with the crew when they ‘returned’? They didn’t look too happy I can tell you, not like you should be if you HAD just travelled to the moon and back. Do you get what I’m saying? And, hey, they couldn’t even answer whether they saw any stars or not when they were down on the surface. Gimme a break, how can anyone believe it actually happened for real.”

They were really starting to come out of the woodwork now, Mike realised. It wouldn’t be long before these three loons actually started barking at the moon, he thought. Time to go.

And fast.

He had only come into Molly’s to have a chat with his new friend Bob, to run a couple of ideas by him for an article he was writing, but Bob doesn’t work weekends apparently. Now Mike understood why. They must open the doors to the local nuthouse on a Saturday night or something. He had made the mistake of sticking around for a few drinks and look what he had gotten himself into. As he quickly finished his beer, he was still trying to figure out how the heck they got onto all this gibberish anyway, then he remembered. It was all coming back to him…

A while ago they had actually been talking about something reasonably sensible, about how people should set goals to help them achieve great things. That conversation was triggered by someone mentioning the breath-taking comeback that Tiger had made by winning the US Masters the week before. A big part of Mike’s book was about goals and goal setting so he had joined in the conversation at that point and made what had clearly turned out to be the major mistake of saying that when President Kennedy said, ‘I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth ...’ he is rightly credited with having set a target which lifted the aspirations of a generation and energized a nation.

Mike had only used that example because he was trying to make the wider point that apart from the impact on individual performance, the ‘right’ goals could really lift groups of people, could get everyone excited and working in the same direction. He was simply trying to explain that, to this day, the concept of proactive goal setting is seen as an important element in personal and business success. But, he hadn’t allowed for the fact that he must have been transported onto the set of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or something. These spacers around him somehow must have only heard his reference to the moon. That had set them off on the Grand Conspiracy Tour. First, they babbled on about how the government was lying to them about aliens landing at Roswell, then it was onto the faked Moon landings. Downing the last of his beer, Mike knew he needed to leave pronto before they moved on to any more wild tales. He was out of there.

He began to walk the few blocks back towards his apartment. On the way, he had a change of mind. He decided to hit his local for a nice steak and a glass of vino. He realized that the advisable thing would probably be to go straight home, immediately, but sensible and Saturday night never sat well together with him. Anyway, he was hungry. At least he knew that he could dine in peace in Dylan’s and watch the TV without any fear of catching any psychosis bugs.

As he later propped up the bar watching the sports news, Mike listened as some Head Coach talked about his views on the season ahead, the targets he had set with the team and the various milestones they needed to hit along the way. That got the hamster going in Mike’s head again and he thought back to the earlier conversation in Molly’s. No, not the nonsensical part, but the bit where he was talking about the importance of goals. The point he had wanted to make, before they drifted into the twilight zone, was how he believed that the setting of goals is important, in life and in work, because it begins to translate ‘fuzzy’ hopes into concrete results against which actions can then be directed. And success measured.

He started to make some notes on the napkin because, despite his brain being well and truly doused, there were some good ideas floating around up there; there was nothing worse than having great alcohol-induced revelations which could not be remembered the following day. And he needed all the help he could get with the book: in particular he had hit a wall at the chapter about goals, so any and all ideas would be welcomed the next day, no matter how random they were. Best to jot things down, he thought.

Listening to Coach in the background, unfortunately – now that Mike had figured out which team he was from, and how they had underperformed over the last few years – he realized that what Coach was talking about were, in truth, more wishes than goals. That reminded him about his own reservations on the whole goal setting thing – a big part of the reason he was having a blank when trying to write about the subject. For sure, he understood that goals are good, but only if and when the goals are good. What he meant was that setting unrealistic goals could do more harm than good. Too many people today, Mike believed, driven by a lot of self-help claptrap, set improbable goals for themselves, given their talents and the level of effort they were prepared to put into realizing them. I want to be famous and the like. This can, when those goals are not achieved, have a negative rather than a positive impact.

Mike believed that this basic principle applied in a work context too. Managers must also be careful when setting business goals - if they want to be effective that is - in terms of how they are devised and structured because badly designed goals can be worse than having no goals at all; they can lead everyone in a direction that is counterproductive. Over the 30 years he had worked in various industries, he had seen many companies establish goals, for example in terms of revenue, which although achieved were not of utmost value longer term because the costs generated in hitting those targets meant that the increased revenue did not proportionally translate to the bottom line.

Tucking into his steak, his mind wandered for a bit. He thought again of another big point he would have made back there in Molly’s which was that goal orientation and effective management, for him, undoubtedly went hand in hand, but with the ‘good goal’ provisions in mind. He really did believe that goals are critical for leaders in all aspects of their lives. He set the knife and fork down and retrieved the pen, as he did he felt the writer’s block lift a little. First and foremost, Mike knew that successful managers needed to set realistic personal goals, which stretched them for sure, but were also within their capability to realize, because they could not simply rely on positive thinking alone to get them where they wanted to go. With regard to work, successful leaders also needed a clear view of what they are trying to achieve but they had to make sure that these goals added real, and lasting, value to the business. Short term goals that were solely revenue-focused were not always the best option.

Mike looked up from the napkin and tuned back into Coach. To be fair, even though he was a tad optimistic with regard to his team’s goals, the man was still making some valid points about the goal setting process he adopts; what he was saying about how he goes about creating goals was interesting because it had application too in a work context, Mike felt. A few boisterous late-night drinkers arrived in and it was a bit hard to make out what Coach was saying. He asked Dylan to turn up the sound so he could hear.

“I always try to include my players in defining the targets in the first place because after all, they are the ones who have to put in the hard yards out there on the field to achieve them. The more involved they are in agreeing our aims, the more likely they will put that extra effort in. I also try to break the season’s goals down into shorter focused sub-goals; this helps us identify ‘little wins’ which encourage further effort. Another important step I take is to get everyone to publicly commit to attaining the goals because breaking promises to their teammates is not something most people like to do.”

These were certainly relevant points and Mike felt they applied just as well for a leader when setting goals for a team in the workplace. He jotted down a few more thoughts as Coach continued.

“To sustain momentum, one of my tasks is to offer continuous encouragement and motivation for the guys, even more so when we suffer a defeat or have a lousy stint at the office. But, it’s not really about me holding their hands at the end of the day. I am a big believer in letting them monitor and evaluate their own progress, they know what they did well, where things went wrong, who was to blame and so on and they can work out how to fix the things that need fixing. It’s very much a two-way process and not just about me telling them what’s wrong and how to put things right.

“Sure, we fight about problems and solutions but that’s a good thing, it at least tells me that they are committed to what we are trying to do as a team. It says they care enough to argue … Once we have a game plan in place, in many ways, my job is to get the hell out of the way and let them put it into action. I support and guide from the sidelines.”

Coach was making a lot of sense, but Mike thought there was one limitation to what he was saying, if those principles were to be applied in organizations. For the inclusive approach to goal setting and achievement to work, the right team needed to be in place; right in the sense of attitude but also with regard to individual and collective skills. No point in trying to set goals with employees who lack commitment to the cause, or in allowing individuals who do not have the necessary talents to self-assess their own performance. When a team is not in the zone, the leader has to carry more of the load both in terms of setting, and then monitoring progress towards the goals. Still, the collective route is a good one when the team can step up to the mark.

As Mike enjoyed the last of his food and wine, it never ceased to amaze him that there were lessons to be learned in the strangest of places. The block had completely lifted now and he would definitely use some of what Coach had said when he resumed writing about goal setting the next day. He spent a few minutes checking his notes on the napkin; at least they were legible, a major achievement given the not too healthy state he was in. That done, it was probably a good time to head for the hills, he thought, because past experience told him that if he had another drink things would likely start to get very messy.

Turning the key in his door, Mike had a final thought on the goal issue. Once business goals are set, he believed, effective managers excelled at sustaining buy-in for them, so much so, that he had often been quite surprised at just how much employees come to see the goals as being their own, with the result that those who work for good managers tend to feel part of something bigger than themselves and view the achievement of organizational goals and satisfying their own needs and aspirations as being compatible, not contradictory. He added those points to his now cluttered napkin.

Later, as his head hit the pillow, he just knew it was going to be sore tomorrow.

If you prefer life and work lessons wrapped up in short story format, why not read my book, ‘Journeys – Short Stories and Tall Tales for Managers’. Click on the image to the left to purchase the book on Amazon, or if you'd like a signed copy you can purchase one directly on this site via our products page.