Goal setting

 

Many people like to set specific goals and objectives for their FPL year. And this is probably a useful thing - for helping you to maintain your focus and enthusiasm throughout the season, and giving you a ready measure of your progress and success.

However, most people seem to focus exclusively on RANK, picking an arbitrary level - Top 500,000, Top 100,000, Top 20,000.... or whatever - that they aspire to reach.

I think that's a complete waste of time. First, because those upper echelons are impossible to reach on skill alone (as I explained in detail in a post last weekend, you need a substantial helping of luck as well to get up that high; and many people at that level are relying on far more luck than skill...).  Second, because it's completely unrealistic for a newbie or a fairly inexperienced or 'casual' manager to get anywhere close to the Top 100,000 (without being very lucky!!); so, claiming something like that as your 'target' is only going to lead to discouragement.  And third, because there's much more variability in the rankings than there is in the average points returns from year to year:  you never know how many people are going to participate in each year, how many of them will take the game 'seriously', how many will be experienced.... and good.... and lucky. Some years, cracking the top 500,000 might not be much of an achievement at all, and others..... it could be quite a mountain to climb.

Hence, I like to focus primarily on points - rather than rank. I already did a short post on what different annual points totals tend to indicate about your performance in the game.

So, my tips for suitable GOALS to give you some focus and inspiration are:

1)  Choose an end-of-year points total that you want to reach.  [Try to make sure it's not completely unrealistic - not miles beyond your previous best; and if you've never played before, it's probably best to assume that you won't get much better than 1,800 or 1,900 first time out. You can also set yourself some intermediate milestones: e.g, every 9 or 10 games, you should be aiming to reach one-quarter of your final target.]

2)  Join some small leagues - ideally with people that you know in real life: and aim to finish TOP (or at least in the top five, say, if you think it's a pretty strong league).  [The strongest of all human motivations is the desire to put one over on friends, family members, workmates and neighbours! Playing against people you know rather than just anonymous netizens puts far more fire in your belly!]

3)  Look for some more mid-sized leagues you could also join, preferably ones where the standard of competition seems quite high. You need only set very general goals for these (at least until you've had a chance to gauge how well you compare to the other participants), such as striving to get into the top half or the top 25%.  [The global league - and many of the larger club and country and broadcaster leagues - are just too huge and anonymous to be interesting to me. I much prefer leagues with just a few 100s, or at most a few 1,000s of players - where you can over time start to recognise and get to know something about your competitors, at least the ones who are most often closest to you in the rankings. You can learn a lot from studying a rival's styles and preferences.]

These are all season-long focuses. For a more immediate weekly goal, the best thing you can do is....

4)  Focus on the 'global average' for the week, and see how much you can beat it by.  [If you're new to the game, just beating the weekly average fairly consistently, even by a little, is a pretty good start. Once you're managing that, you can steadily ramp up the margin of superiority you hope for: 5 points better than average, 10 points better.... 15 points better?  Note, however, that however good you are, there will be some weeks when everything goes wrong for you and you end up being substantially below the global average. Those weeks hurt bad - just got to suck it up.]

PROSPER, AND BE HAPPY!