Why Your Goals Suck
set habits not goals
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It’s Monday morning, time to train. You get after it. It’s a hard session and you sweat profusely. Tuesday rolls around, and instead of getting up early you tell yourself you don’t have to wake up because you trained hard yesterday. Wednesday is a rest day, and Thursday maybe you get a lift in. No time to workout in the afternoon on Friday because you got invited out for happy hour. The boys text you Saturday at 2. You proceed to consume enough alcohol over the next 12 hours to annihilate the 17 year old you. Sunday rolls around and you obviously have to smash some pancakes because that’s your proven hangover cure. Then it’s Monday morning again, time to train…
You tell yourself you need to make a change. Be more consistent. But the pain of the future you foresee (or don’t) doesn’t outweigh the pleasure of your current environment. Your dreams and nightmares have no bearing on your current actions. This is a miserable state I aim to address in today’s post.
Goal setting (and achievement) has always been fascinating to me. Not in the sense that I have spent a ton of time pondering how to set goals. Rather, it is the exact opposite. I feel I’ve been able to smash goals and be consistent in the absence of direct thought. There’s an enormous amount of research, books, podcasts, and lectures on this topic. I’ve found it interesting because I never thought or read about “how to set goals” early on. There was something I felt compelled to accomplish, I worked towards it, and in more cases than not, achieved it. A lot of my energy was (and is) focused on the present day actions I have to complete. There’s an overarching direction I’m pointed towards, but after making that decision I make my money in the daily actions I take towards it.
During the timeline of that achievement there were often miniature (or MASSIVE) failures that made me work even harder towards that thing. For example, in college I attended the Sapper Leader Course. I had a 4 week window to pass (meaning there was no buffer for failure/recycles). Obviously it did not go well. I was young, cocky, and in incredible shape. As a result I thought I could float through a course aimed at Officers and NCO’s based on my physical abilities alone. But I took that experience as a lesson, allowing me to later attend and pass Ranger school in 62 days (‘62 and through’).
Another example: although inconceivable now, Freshman year of college I did not max my APFT (Army Physical Fitness Test). In high school I remember taking the test with my varsity soccer coach grading - although not too strict on the push-ups. Arriving to my first year of college I still have engraved in my skull the pure disappointment I felt of having a Green Beret NCO berate me for my performance. I spent my entire high school years running and playing soccer. I was lanky, tall, skinny, long arms, and performed terribly on the push-ups part of the test when graded to the standard.
At no point during that time in my life did I think “wow I need to set some goals.” There was a task at hand. I had to perform better because there was no other option. I sought out people who I recognized as the best, gained information, and worked. The work doesn’t care about what your goals are. The work that needed doing was not opinionated. All that the work cared about was that it got done. To me, there wasn’t even an option. I was (and still am) fiercely competitive. Even more than I hated not doing well was the anger I felt that my peers beat me in the event. And that is coming from a mediocre soccer player who barely got a D2 college offer (I chose ROTC instead) and mid 3’s GPA in high school. I was average. In high school I’m sure my mind was far off from caring about grades and far more on… something else. But a light switched on in college. I certainly don’t believe everyone needs to go to college or join the military. But for me it was enough to trigger a desire for competition and a drive towards performance like I had never felt before. It was addicting. And that’s for good reason as Dr. Andrew Huberman has stated multiple times. Competition feels good. And what feels even better is delayed gratification from working towards something, competing in that thing, and then winning.
In this article I am going to heavily reference Andrew Huberman’s episode on goal setting, which you can find here and balance it with my own perspective and evidence from hundreds of people I have worked with to achieve very specific goals, whether it be bodyweight/physique focused, training for a military fitness assessment, school, selection, or performance goals such as speed and strength.
To begin, let’s reference this beautiful drawing I made below.
I don’t think this is 100% accurate but gets the point across. Generally speaking, if the pain of our current/future circumstances outweighs daily pleasure or our current environment then we are incentivized to make changes. On the flip side - the curve of misery - sometimes we can be disincentivized by the daunting task of making a change and be forced down a dark path. Obviously this is in reference to our bodyweight and physique, but applies to any goal you may have. That’s where the 85% rule comes into play as well as something I’ve spoken about MANY times in the past: start small. The 85% rule (reference: nature.com) is simply a study that showed success in accomplishing goals by choosing a goal that you get right about 85% of the time, and making errors 15% of the time or less. Set a high goal, but not so lofty that you don’t make any progress at all. It’s never going to be exactly 15% error, but make things PRETTY hard, but not so hard that you’re failing often. I want you to be continuously reaching, but not constantly failing or it’s too difficult for you at this point in your life. And that’s OK! This is different for everyone.
An easy example is moving to a healthy nutrition plan. If you’ve never focused on eating healthy or tracking your calories and macros, it can seem overwhelming to have to track everything. But, maybe your initial goal is just to eat healthier, about 85% of the time. So 6 days out of the week you eliminate alcohol and fried foods. Just being consistent with that alone could lead to tremendous benefits, and allows to stack goals on top of each other. You have a general direction → better physique and fat loss which drives your daily actions. The actions in the first month are just to eat clean 6/7 days per week. Once you see progress and are bought in, you choose to ramp up the difficulty by tracking calories and macros. Again, aim to get it right 85% of the time. If you go out to eat for lunch, go on a date, etc you can’t always track and shouldn’t - enjoy yourself (unless you’re weird and bring a food scale on a date. pls don’t do this). But the same policy applies. Aim to get it right 85% of the time and definitely don’t knock yourself for not having 100% compliance on the path to this goals. As I said previously, it’s about daily actions in the general direction we want to head.
If starting off exercising after a long period of nothing, starting with easier and shorter workouts is almost always better purely to build consistency. If you have a longer history of training and proper eating, you can scale the difficulty of the challenges you face to keep you engaged. And that leads into flow state which at this point is a cliche but important nonetheless. We want to be challenged enough to be engaged, but not too much so as to be disappointed by continuous failure.
Overtime we build skill and consistency and are able to increase the difficulty of goal we chase. The bottom line, focus on picking goals that will challenge you but are not insurmountable. If you’ve never run before maybe don’t start out with training for a marathon (for health and the amount of time it will take to get there) but instead knock out a 10k and build to bigger races. If you’re 50 pounds overweight perhaps focus on the first 10 pounds. That is a MAJOR win, especially if you’ve been struggling to lose weight for years. The key is to start small and gain wins early on to build the flywheel of dopamine hits from perceived wins.
It’s one thing to make goals. Anyone can write down a list on a piece of paper. It’s a completely different thing to be disciplined enough to work towards it. I posted this on instagram earlier:
In the story I told earlier about push-ups - I didn’t have a choice. There’s no other option but to make a change. Some people are disciplined enough to just make progress without any real consequences. But it is far easier to recognize how our current actions are hurting us in the present and will set up a nightmare case in the future. Once the desire for progress, effort, and sometimes sacrifice outweighs anything else we have no option but to work towards a change. And as I said previously, we make our money in the daily actions and habits. Build consistency and take the small wins as they come. This only reinforces our internal buy-in and trust in the process - regardless of what we’re trying to accomplish.
In closing, your goals don’t make you unique. I’m paraphrasing from Alex Hormozi: It’s the activities you do consistently that make you unique. The goal of the winner is to commit to the activities (the process) and the goal of the loser is to commit to the goal. Don’t worry about how long it takes or how slow your progress is. If you actually enjoy the activities and subsequent grind to get there, you will be successful on a long enough time horizon.
Below is a quick overview of everything I’ve talked about in this post. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out or drop a comment.
Cheers ✌️
DISCLAIMER
This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Please consult a medical professional before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol.