My sophomore year of college I found a huge whiteboard on CraigsList for $20. Every semester I’d write down a few goals I wanted to accomplish by finals week. I’d wake up every morning and look at that whiteboard to remind myself what I wanted to accomplish. Get good grades. Join the 1,000 pound club. Get a girlfriend. 

I kept up this strategy for a few years until I discovered something: these goals were making me miserable. Of course, nobody likes to fail and miss a goal. But even when I reached a goal I wasn’t happy. I decided to stop setting goals for a couple months and just see what happened. During this time I realized that there were a couple things about the entire premise of goal setting that don’t resonate with me. In the past 12 months I’ve implemented a new growth plan, replacing goal-based growth with goalless growth. Doing this has not only made me happier, but I believe it’s made me grow faster than I ever did with goals.

This isn’t to say that all goals are bad or that everybody should stop setting goals. If you’re someone who absolutely loves goals then this essay isn’t for you. But if goals make you frustrated or maybe even unhappy, then read on.

Why I don’t like goals

Most goals all have one thing in common: trophies. Whether it’s running a marathon, making a certain amount of money, or buying a home, these trophies have come to represent success. However, trophies don’t always equate to success. Success is not what we’ve done, it’s who we are and what we consistently do.

One of the goals I had when I was in college was to run a marathon (I never ended up running one, and will likely never do so because of some health issues). I’ve come to realize that success is not actually running the marathon, but being able to run the marathon. Running 26.2 miles in one go is an impressive feat, yes, but what’s really impressive is accruing the health and capability to run 26.2 miles. Growth doesn’t actually come from a single cold morning running down a canyon with hundreds of other people. It comes from the dozens of mornings beforehand spent pounding the pavement.

Second, accomplishments can occur in one of two places: the future or the past. When we put so much emphasis on achieving goals, our minds are forced to live in the future. Are we constantly daydreaming of some future state, instead of focusing on the present?

When I was in between jobs during the summer of 2020, I had a singular goal: get a job as soon as possible. By the time fall rolled around I had landed an awesome job working with an incredible team. As I look back at those months of being jobless, the feelings of stress come rushing back. It was one of the most mentally taxing times of my life. I spent hours glued to my computer combing through job postings, connecting with recruiters, and writing cover letters. But I now realize that those short months had the potential to be the happiest of my life. I was a stay at home dad for the first 4 months of my daughter’s life. I had the flexibility to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, even if that meant going for a long bike ride at 2 in the afternoon. I was able to work on a startup idea with a good friend and learned a monumental amount about entrepreneurship, startups, and software. Unfortunately, I spent so much time fretting and stressing about the future that I wasn’t able to fully enjoy those precious days.

Third, setting and reaching certain types of goals is a cyclical process that wears us down. Scott Adams said it best: 

“To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game… If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.”

Goals are a surefire way to grow. But if the process breeds unhappiness, is that growth even worthwhile? Who cares if I reach every goal I ever set. I could become one of the smartest, strongest, fastest, most well-read people in the world. But if I wasn’t happy it wouldn’t be worth it.

Goalless Growth

By not relying on goals to facilitate our growth, we can live without obsessing over the future while still maximizing our potential. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: What’s the vision?

The first step is to have a long-term vision—not of what you want to accomplish—but who you want to be. What values are important to you? How do you want people to talk about you at your funeral?

For me, at a high level I think of the four things that I repeat to my daughter every night before bed: you are kind, you are important, you are smart, you are strong (inspired by the movie “The Help”, and remembered with the acronym KISS).

Wait a minute… Isn’t a vision just a goal, but described a little bit differently? Yes, it is, but that key difference between “being” and “doing” is really important. “Being” insinuates a steady-state; something that is core to your person, character, or way of living. It isn’t some checkbox or trophy. You can cheat “doing”, but you can’t cheat “being”.

Step 2: What are the habits?

The next step is to identify the habits and processes that will help you become who you envision. These can be positive (things you do) or negative (things you avoid). They can be quantitative or qualitative, subjective or objective. What matters is that you have a daily checklist of things that—if consistently repeated—will help you become the person you envision yourself being.

Here are a few habits that I track daily in Notion:

• Sleep well
• Move my body (1+ hr on bike, lift weights at the gym, or go for a walk outside on rest days)
• Eat intuitively
• Read something, write something
• Meditate
• Quality play with my daughter
• Gratitude journal

My experience

One of the things I’ve learned is that whether it’s OKRs at work, natural life milestones, or goals just sneaking into my mind, I’ll never be fully able to rid myself of future “goals and accomplishments”. And that’s ok! Goals are an ingrained part of our culture and useful in many areas. But rather than setting unneeded, additional goals for myself, I can take control of my mindset whenever possible to focus on my habits and processes.

Another insight I’ve had about goalless growth is that the day-to-day looks almost exactly the same as goal-based growth. The only difference is the mindset. I now find myself focusing on what’s in my control today, rather than some future state and payoff. For example, one of my goals has been to work for a venture capital fund. But with goalless growth, I now focus on building an investor mindset and the skills needed to be a great investor now. I’m subscribed to several startup newsletters I read daily, I’ll write short investment memos for startups I’m bullish on, and I frequently do deep dives into new markets that I’m unfamiliar with. If this leads me to venture capital, great. But rather than daydreaming about some future career move, I can enjoy the learning and growth process today.

The biggest difference I’ve seen is that it’s so much easier for me to live in the present than the future. The most apparent manifestation of this is how I think about my daughter. When she was just a newborn I’d stare at her while she was sleeping and my mind would flood with questions about her future. What type of world was she going to grow up in? Was she going to make friends easily? What would she study in college? Would she even go to college? Now as I watch her sleep on the video monitor, my mind is occupied with different, and perhaps more important questions. How many times will we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar today? What new words will she learn this week? Will she want to watch Encanto or Bluey? Should we have Mickey Mouse pancakes, or chocolate chip pancakes? Yes, there’s absolutely a time and place to think about the future (I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time optimizing her 529). But today, I’m going to enjoy whatever time I can making sure she knows her dad loves her.