The Problem with Setting Goals and At Least 1 Reason You Need To Rethink Them

Read if you’re about to set some goals

A Cycle Begins

A new year, new quarter, or maybe just a new day.

We hear that train rumbling again.

“If you set goals, you’re more likely to achieve them.”

And if you don’t, then what are you even doing?

I set goals. I achieve some of them, probably like you.

It’s easy to add goals. But it’s not easy to take an honest sober look at your life.

I’m reminded of this paragraph from the wonderfully bizarre short story called “Swords” by Robert Aickman:

…most of the time we have no notion of what we really want, or we lose sight of it. And the even more important fact that what we really want just doesn’t fit in with life as a whole, or very seldom. Most folk learn slowly, and never altogether learn at all.

We don’t know what we want. We lose sight of what we want. What we want doesn’t fit into life. And this realisation comes to us slowly.

Despite having set many goals, this passage strikes me as true.

A Cycle Repeats

After spending a few weeks re-reading the literature on habits, I’m reminded that motivation is a faulty engine of change.

Goals motivate.

But goals have us in 2 modes: 
1. set — achieve — quick celebration — move to next (repeat)
2. set — not achieve — be unhappy — keep trying (repeat)

Setting goals makes us feel good in the moment. And only if we’re making good progress can we feel good again. It’s a string of events with mini-anticipations at the start and finish.

For the remainder of time, we’re grinding it out.

Leaving that somewhat mechanical picture aside, what if we looked at the source of our goals?

Things here take a turn for even worse.

The Source Of My Pain

Where do our goals, our aspirations come from?

While SMART goals, lead measures, OKRs, etc. are distilled from bigger things, where do those bigger things come from? What drives them?

Perhaps in business, we can point at a strategy document, even a mathematical model that explains why A follows B, and therefore why we must have this product launched next month.

But personal life is often devoid of such elaborate constructs. Even if we develop personal systems, underneath it all is still a web of desires.

All people have desires. Those desires set in the early life are perhaps the strongest and are also the least examined.

Over time, we feel a great many emotions. Emotions bring disharmony. To bring us back to harmony & homeostasis, we learn to deal with them in ways that are healthy & often unhealthy.

In the end, we want to escape pain. Change works when people feel good, not when they feel bad.

Big spikes in motivation, i.e. desire are perfect in the moment and may sometimes feel like destiny is calling.

Indeed, when I’m motivated in the moment to become fit, that gets me to do an array of actions, proclamations & visualisations. I might just go get a gym membership. Perhaps I’ll even get out to the gym the following morning. But soon, my attention is deviated elsewhere. My motivation slips. The weekend comes. The food arrives.

This horse is back on the same race track.

Models R US

In a way, what may be the most enduring thing in our lives is the need to feel the kick from establishing yet another new desire.

Desires require models. You can certainly be innovative and unique, but even the most innovative visions rely on models. Your imagination fills 80% of that model, for better or worse. The models are a husk we see. We don’t see inside the engine room, only the outside where the paint is fresh.

So all this time, you’ve been like me. Collecting voices.

You too, like me, have been collecting desires and goals from people, celebrities, books, father and mother figures, and random people on the internet FOR YEARS.

“The supply of information to which we are exposed thanks to modernity is transforming humans from the equable fellow into the neurotic one.” — N.N. Taleb

As individualism rises, it’s foolish to believe that it will produce a world of individuals.

No. The majority will just model the new models.

Unchain My Soul

What are some things that don’t rely on motivation, don’t rely on desire, don’t need goals, but still feel good no matter how many times we access the tap — and don’t impact our health or mental capacity negatively?

Desire can endure in such cases when these conditions are met:

• Can you see yourself doing it today and then doing it until you die?

• Does it get better with time? Does it compound?

Removing prompts — whatever they are — is your first and easiest bet if you want things to change this year. Prompts are everywhere.

Scrolling through Twitter, even if you’re following smart people, will prompt you to read the books they recommend, invest money or time into ideas that they share.

Every new book or podcast will throw you into a slightly new direction.

Even reading this article is a prompt to start adopting this new model of thinking.

But if you made it this far, try something else.

I’m still setting goals.

But instead of moving on with them, I really sit with them. I don’t trust them. Not yet.

Maybe, like all things Lindy, they must endure to be accepted. Maybe old goals, if unfulfilled, are better than new ones.

But don’t look at me. Look at yourself.

This article came, unsurprisingly, from a prompt by Tiago Forte on Twitter. It was an experiment to see if I could turn the notes I had taken from the previous 7 days into an article. It took me longer to produce than I would have liked, but it’s here.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the writing of Luke Burgis & BJ Fogg, whose work I had noted down most recently and therefore drew upon for inspiration and scaffolding. If you recognise their ideas here, it’s intentional.

Finally, check out this humongous piece from Wait But Why that picks at the same ideas and beyond.