Don’t Set Goals Until You Know What You Want

Ambition is dangerous without direction.

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

Not a member yet? Read here for free.

Around a year ago, I wrote an article titled Change My Mind: Goals are Overrated.

After finishing, I let it sit there.

I realised I had stopped living according to objectives — self-set or otherwise. I was vocal about the destructiveness of goals: they oversimplified and distorted reality.

Great achievements could not be meticulously planned anyway.

*“Death to stats and metrics, long live serendipity and playful discovery!” — or so went my motto.*

But I felt uneasy. Something seemed slightly off.

A few months later, I revisited my story.

And realised I’d come to straight-up disagree with its central thesis.

The Role of Goals

I had recently read Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective when I wrote said unpublished article.

The book itself wasn’t great, but the perspective was: two AI researchers writing in pre-ChatGPT times about the distorting effects of clear, one-dimensional objectives.

They might have overgeneralised their point to all of modern society.

Still, I was sympathetic to the main point. The book had a strong effect on me — if only in giving me the final push.

For a while, I renounced all goals.

What is obvious in hindsight is that I was really rejecting narrow, ill-formulated goals.

It just so happens that those were the kinds of goals I had come to know.

I was confused about my values. Or maybe, I could feel the inner contradictions but was unable to articulate them yet.

Without strong, coherent values, setting ambitious goals is just a turbocharge to running faster in the wrong direction.

It may not be obvious from the outside when one is climbing the wrong mountain. Plenty of people experience a version of success accompanied by societal reinforcement, only to wake up years later and realise they’re living someone else’s life.

In my case, my values had begun to change strongly.

Yet I was acting like I valued technological development, efficiency, optimisation, and prestige above all.

The more the gap grew between the implicit values my actions hinted at and my actual, transforming values, the less motivated and ambitious I became.

In that situation, rejecting goals was convenient — because I lacked the motivation to set any.

Fast forward, and I’ve turned my back on recent professional pursuits once more and made several substantial life changes. My values, practical priorities and actions are largely realigned.

And so, a few months back, right after returning from my first India trip, I instead asked myself, which goals are worth pursuing? This was the culmination of several changes in perspective.

With all of that said, let’s get into how to actually set goals.

Know What You Want

The primary factor preventing many of us from continuously setting and achieving goals is a lack of clarity.

Or rather, temporary clarity.

Temporary clarity is a double-edged sword — the very act of leaning into it is what often leads to realisations and better goals.

But it is supremely important to make genuine efforts not to bullshit ourselves.

The primary reason for the lack of clarity is simply misalignment. Cognitive dissonance. Emotions, intuition, thoughts, and ideas disagreeing, pointing in different directions.

Before any goal-setting can work, it is absolutely paramount to realign.

That can require intense reflection. Or the opposite — a lot of physically moving around in the world. Talking to people. Dancing, singing, running.

Whatever connects you back to yourself, and to the world around you.

Ideally, your intuition tells you what’s right, and how to reconnect — assuming you don’t constantly fall prey to the chatter of the mind, or your ego.

If not, you may first want to train yourself to listen to your intuition again.

I’m not saying ‘always act purely on an intuitive basis’. That would cause problems in itself.

But feeling out of sync — separated from oneself and one’s environment — is often directly related to a disconnect from intuition. And many societal structures and norms, especially in the West, are highly conducive to this.

(Hint: going travelling is a wonderful way to counteract it. So are most in-person live events — especially when music is involved.)

Reconnecting with your intuition and understanding what you truly want is vital in the process of goal-setting.

But of course, finding clarity is not the same thing as setting and achieving your aims in life.

It is an essential preparatory step — but what’s next?

Zooming Out

Now, before I go into the nitty-gritty, let me point to an aspect I consider fundamental.

Goal-setting by itself narrows one’s perspective and shines a spotlight on specific phenomena, situations, and opportunities.

That is great at times, and an integral part of the process.

However, the danger lies in continuously and completely succumbing to that state.

We absolutely need times where we zoom out.

To reassess. Question if the goals are still right, if the path we chose is fit for us (and we for it), and whether we are truly willing to make the associated sacrifices.

Are we okay with letting our social life fall by the wayside? With giving up on the near-term perspective of a stable income as we start to take our creative pursuits seriously?

With leaving home, friends and family behind, if we aim to become diplomats or digital nomads?

The bigger and more ambitious the goals, the more sacrifices they usually involve — whether those are immediately obvious or not.

However, if you’re like me, you may feel like you don’t quite have a choice. Some things in life call you, and you simply have to answer. Anything else would feel like betrayal.

Just don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

If you’re ambitious and constantly running — after some notion of productivity and progress, or because all your peers are doing the same — take a second first.

Pause. Inhale deeply.

This is a dance, not a race.

How to Actually Set Good Goals

So, enough on broader considerations and frameworks. Let’s get to the mechanics.

First, we need to get clear on the most important questions:

• What is important in the formulation of a goal?
• What are sensible time horizons for goal-setting?
• When should we abandon or change our goals?

These cover most of the essentials.

My answers below are a synthesis of psychological research with some personal thoughts thrown in — so I’ll keep it concise.

The components of good goals.

*“We found that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best.” (Locke & Latham, 2002)*

That is to say: setting specific and hard goals is superior to vague “do your best” type goals.

The exception is highly complex tasks , where people lack the necessary skills or knowledge and need to strategise about adapting their existing capabilities.

Apart from being specific, the most effective goals are also ambitious.

Challenging goals tend to lead to more focused effort. And achieving them leads to setting even more ambitious ones in the future.

“[…] goal setting is first and foremost a discrepancy-creating process, in that the goal creates constructive discontent with our present performance.” (Locke & Latham, 2006)

Interestingly, those with harder-to-achieve goals appear to be more dissatisfied , which is part of the reason they set and achieve higher goals than the average.

Make of that what you will.

With the caveat that “satisfaction” here is more of a technical term than what we usually mean by “life satisfaction.”

What are sensible time horizons for goal-setting?

This is not a straightforward question.

Given that ambitious goals work best, those might sit several months or years in the future.

There is also a lot of variation by task and environment. A business will choose different goal horizons than an independent artist, for instance.

So instead of a direct answer, here are the mechanisms through which goals affect performance:

• They serve a directive function (where do you focus your energy?)
• They energise (high goals lead to greater effort)
• They affect persistence (hard goals favour prolonged effort)
• They lead to the discovery of relevant knowledge and strategies

The more ambitious the goal, the more weight these things carry. So the practical question becomes: how ambitious can I be, given the skills and knowledge I have?

Short time horizons and deadlines actually help — if they’re not wildly unrealistic.

A near-standard strategy is to set more abstract goals for the faraway future, then break those down into concrete monthly, weekly, and daily goals.

What I do now: I set three main weekly goals (too many become disorienting). Then each morning, as I write my morning pages, I create three goals for the day that are predominantly aligned with the weekly ones.

When should we abandon or change our goals?

This is clearly the most personal question, and its answer depends on innumerable factors.

Let me give you my mental model.

Goals, as I see them, are not designed to be ends in themselves. They’re ideally part of one’s form of living and being.

Which is why it’s worth differentiating between the two kinds:

1. The goals related to practicalities, past obligations, and so on — the ones that feel more like duties than anything you truly want to work towards.
2. And the goals that are integrated into our whole life and personal development.

The former, I’d drop as soon as possible.

What “possible” means depends on personal judgment. But usually other people care far less than we’d expect about our consistency. And dropping such baggage can be extremely liberating.

In the case of goals that are ‘truly ours’, it can be painful to drop them.

I think it is often necessary when we embark on anything truly ambitious to be quite delusional, and stick to goals far beyond what’s “reasonable.”

Be More Delusional

James Dyson spent five years trying to develop a vacuum cleaner prototype, which he then failed to license to manufacturers — only to build his own company.

*“There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one.” (James Dyson)*

That’s quite some intense persistence.

I don’t know how many more people built thousands of vacuum cleaner prototypes and never made a dime.

But it is in the nature of ambitious goals that you may fail.

When to accept failure… well, I’d say be delusional.

Not so outrageously delusional that you ruin your entire life (and the lives of those around you) by sticking to goals that slip away further and further.

I mostly go by feeling and intuition on this one.

But the core question is: how much do you want it?

When you’re fine letting go, pivoting, embarking on another project or experimenting with a new goal — maybe just do it.

And if you’re so absolutely obsessed with the goals you’ve created — well, I doubt I’ll be the one to change your mind anyway.

Keep going if you must.

And do it right.