NICE Goals
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Ali's alternative to SMART goals for beginners and anyone currently struggling with a habit. NICE stands for Near-term, Input-based, Controllable and Energizing. A SMART goal — hit x% body fat by y date, verified by a DEXA scan — is specific and measurable and thoroughly demotivating to someone on week one at the gym. A NICE goal asks only what you can do this week, defines it as an input rather than an outcome, keeps it inside your control, and makes it energizing using play, power and people. The claim is that this lowers mental friction enough to start and stay consistent; once real expertise exists, ambitious SMART goals start working again.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Diagnose your level first
If you're a beginner at the thing or currently struggling with it, use NICE. Once you have a certain level of expertise in the field, specific and ambitious goals work nicely.
Watch out SMART goals aren't wrong — they're wrong for beginners, where they mostly generate discouragement.
- 2
N — make it near-term
Ask only what you can do this week. Ignore the distant deadline and the end state entirely while you're building the habit.
Pro tip Shrink the horizon until the goal stops feeling like a mountain summit.
- 3
I — make it input-based
Set the goal on the action, not the result: write for 20 minutes, not write 10,000 words; make one video a week, not hit a subscriber count.
- 4
C — keep it controllable
Check that a normal bad week can't defeat it. Writing for four hours a day is outside most people's control because life gets in the way; twenty minutes is not.
Pro tip If someone else's decision can make you fail, the goal isn't controllable.
Watch out Pegging yourself to an outcome outside your control is what burns people out.
- 5
E — make it energizing
Attach the goal to play, power or people so doing it generates energy. If the activity itself is fun, consistency stops depending on willpower.
- 6
Graduate later, not sooner
Keep the loose goal until competence is real, then layer specific, measurable targets on top if they still help. Ali still uses a NICE goal for the gym because he isn't trying to be a bodybuilder.
Pro tip Match goal precision to ambition level — a basic goal is the right goal for a basic aim.
In the wild
It took Ali roughly six months and 52 videos to reach his first thousand subscribers, while at medical school. He recognised at the time that any subscriber or view goal would only produce disappointment, so his only goal was to publish at least one video a week — an input, in his control, energizing because making videos was fun, and near-term rather than aimed at a metric.
→ He has published one or two videos a week for six years without really stopping, and the channel grew precisely because the bar stayed low.
Ali sets no SMART goals for the gym. The goal is to go three times a week, lift sensible weights with compound lifts, and roughly aim for progressive overload — lifting a bit more than last time. He notes a bodybuilder would find this dumb and would need specific goals, but he isn't a bodybuilder and doesn't want to be.
→ The vaguer, controllable goal gets him to the gym more reliably than a specific target would.
Common mistakes
Setting outcome goals you don't control
Ali points to friends who need a million views per upload or the sponsors pull out. Those are the people who burn out, because the metric was never theirs to determine.
Using SMART goals on day one
A measurable, time-bound body-fat target is demotivating for a complete beginner. Precision that would sharpen an expert simply raises the barrier to starting.
Choosing a goal that needs a perfect week
Four hours of writing a day collapses the first time life intervenes, and one failure tends to end the habit rather than dent it.
From the transcript
“so n for near term I for input based C for controllable and E for energizing so near term input based controllable and energizing”
“more more that I will write for 20 minutes because that's an input that's controllable it's within my control”
“I try very hard to not set outcom metric goals that are outside of my control”
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