The Goal That Actually Matters
“The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”
Naval Ravikant
Five years ago, my wife and I set an audacious goal.
At the time, the math didn't exactly math. We would need some exceptional wins along the way to make it happen. That is the thing about audacious goals: they force you to think differently. They force you to break the patterns of your life.
Then we put our heads down and did the work. I tracked our progress along the way and did a more in-depth review each year. Interestingly enough, each year we were trending toward the goal we had originally set.
About six months before the deadline, I told my wife that I thought we were going to accomplish it.
She didn't believe me and, candidly, I'm not sure I completely believed me either. It didn't seem real.
We reached the goal five years and one month after we set it.
Looking back, what I find most interesting isn't that we achieved it. It's that I couldn't have explained at the beginning how we were going to get there.
There were too many things that happened over those five years that we couldn't have predicted. Some were decisions we made, some were opportunities that came along, and some were simply circumstances changing at the right time.
For much of that period, it also felt like we were losing more than we were winning.
That is probably a fairly normal way to experience a long-term goal. We are much better at noticing the things that go wrong than the things that go right. When you're living through it, the setbacks are right in front of you, while the small wins often don't feel like much at the time.
When I look back at those five years, three things stand out to me.
Set an Audacious Goal
I read The Science of Scaling by Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson last year, and one of the ideas I've continued to think about is the value of setting an audacious goal that is big enough to force you to rethink how you're currently operating.
I'm planning to reread the book because I think there is more to that idea than simply setting a bigger number.
Our five-year goal did something similar for us. If we had asked ourselves what we could reasonably accomplish based only on our existing circumstances, we would not have chosen the same target.
It was big enough that the existing path wasn't going to get us there.
That meant we had to think differently about how we were going to reach it. We had to make different decisions, pay attention to opportunities we might otherwise have ignored, and stay with the goal even when the short-term picture wasn't particularly encouraging.
I don't think every goal needs to be outrageous. But there is value in choosing something that requires you to grow into the person who can achieve it.
Make Sure It Actually Matters to You
This might be the more important part.
A goal can be ambitious and still be the wrong goal.
There were people who looked at what we were doing and told us there were faster or more financially efficient ways to get to the same place. They weren't necessarily wrong. They were just optimizing for something different than we were.
Our goal wasn't simply about getting to a particular financial number as quickly as possible. It was connected to how we wanted to live. We wanted more freedom, less financial pressure and more control over our time.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit since starting my executive coaching training. There are some incredibly accomplished people in my cohort, and one of the things I've noticed is that being very good at achieving things doesn't necessarily mean you've spent much time deciding what you actually want.
We're generally pretty good at the doing part. We set the target, make the plan, execute and achieve.
But if you haven't spent much time deciding what you actually want, you can become extremely good at achieving someone else's definition of success.
Naval Ravikant has a line I like: "The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life."
You need to know how to get somewhere, but first you need to know where you actually want to go.
Our goal wasn't necessarily the fastest path to the outcome someone else might have chosen. It was the right path for us because it was connected to the life we wanted.
Keep Going
Five years is a long time to stay committed to something when you aren't sure you're going to accomplish it.
And honestly, there were plenty of times when we didn't think we were going to hit the goal. It wasn't just that the goal felt far away. At times, it felt like we were constantly getting hit by tidal waves. One thing after another would go wrong, and it sometimes felt like we were taking a beating without making much progress.
We just kept paddling.
Through Founders, David Senra has spent years reading the biographies of entrepreneurs and studying the patterns across their lives. One of the things that comes up again and again is how long many of the people he studies stayed in the game before the outcome became obvious.
James Dyson spent years working through thousands of prototypes before his vacuum business took off. Jensen Huang spent decades building NVIDIA before the company became what it is today. There are plenty of other examples throughout the founders Senra studies.
Senra has a line I like: "time carries most of the weight."
When you're in the middle of a five-year goal, you don't experience the compounding. You experience Tuesday. You experience the month where you're behind, the decision that didn't work, the unexpected expense, or the opportunity that fell through.
But when you look back over five years, the picture can be very different.
There were plenty of things that felt like major setbacks at the time that I can barely remember now. There were also things that seemed relatively insignificant that ended up having a much bigger impact than we could have imagined.
That is one of the strange things about staying with something for a long time. You can't know which events are going to matter when you're living through them.
We kept paddling, and eventually we were able to catch the wave.
Give It Enough Time to Surprise You
Recently, something in my business didn't work out the way I expected it to. A few years ago, I probably would have spent a lot of time worrying about what it meant.
This time, I didn't really care.
Not because I don't care about the business. I do. I just have a much longer view of things now. One disappointing outcome doesn't tell me very much about where I'll end up five years from now.
I think that is one of the benefits of pursuing something that actually matters to you. You become less dependent on every individual result going your way.
Five years ago, we couldn't see the entire path. We couldn't have explained exactly how we were going to get there.
We just knew that the goal mattered to us enough to keep moving toward it.
Five years and one month later, we got there.
If you're sitting on a goal you've been thinking about, write it down. Write down why it matters to you and what achieving it would actually change about your life. Then track your progress, but give yourself enough distance to see the trend rather than letting every setback define the story.
You might be surprised by what happens when you choose the right thing, keep paddling, and give it enough time to work.
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