🎯 Don’t Set Goals (Do This Instead)

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💡 The Big Idea: Goal Setting is A Fundamentally Flawed Approach to Achievement

Our society has a confirmation bias towards setting goals.

There’s only one problem: it doesn’t really work.

Every year, people make New Year’s Resolutions (i.e. goals). But research at Scranton University shows that 92% of New Year’s Resolutions will fail.

In Atomic Habits, author James Clear explains why:

Think about it. As I write this, the NBA finals just wrapped up here in the U.S. Every year, the winners get interviewed. And they always say something along the lines of “We knew we’d be here, we worked so hard, we’ve been laser-focused on our goals,” etc.

All teams have the same goal, but not all teams achieve the same result.

But all 30+ teams had the same goal. Yet there’s only a single winner.

Which means there must be something more important to success than simply setting goals.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals are D.U.M.B.

Lots of productivity gurus have been extolling the virtues of S.M.A.R.T. goals for a very long time. They tell us we need to make our goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Based

I believe this approach is fundamentally flawed. It can create motivation, but it’s not a sustainable way to work or live.

And I learned that lesson the hard way.

6 years ago, I decided I was going to set a goal for myself to run my first half-marathon. I trained almost year and a half for my first race. My goal was to run the 13.1 mile course in under 2 hours (~8:30 pace).

Unfortunately, I overtrained and the week before the race my patella tendon slipped off my kneecap on my left leg, causing making running very painful.

But I was obsessed with my goal. I had trained too long to give up now — I was going to run (and finish) that race no matter what.

And I did. I even did it in under 2 hours. But as I crossed the finish line, I instantly felt depressed.

I realized that the moment I achieved my goal, there was a void I had to fill.

The natural thing would be to set another goal (run another race). One problem: I knew I was hurt and that wasn’t an option. So before I could even find my loved one by the finish line who had come to cheer me on, my brain was screaming:

That’s the problem with goals: the goalposts keep moving. The moment you achieve a goal, you need to replace it with a new one. You’re never satisfied and always focused on what Dan Sullivan calls The Gap.

The Gap is the distance between your current state and your ideal one (your goal).

You’re never satisfied, and you’re always miserable because progress doesn’t come as fast as you think it should.

Which is why I firmly believe habits and routines are more important than goals.

Habits are things that you consistently do. And they become part of your identity. For example, what does a writer do? They write. So if you want to become a writer, you just need to write. You don’t need to focus on word counts or seat time.

Just show up every day. You don’t need to be laser-focused on achieving an outcome. You can slow down and enjoy the process. The gains will still come while you’re having fun.

The Gain is the distance from where you started to where you are now.

If you repeatedly do the right things the right way, the score will take care of itself.

Regardless of whether you had a goal or not.

Enjoy this essay? Help other people find it by joining the conversation here 🙂

⭐ What’s New in Obsidian 1.6.4

Maybe you noticed that in 1.6.3 something happened where when you tried to tick a checkbox it ended up not doing anything or checking the wrong box (there is bug report in the forum here.) I noticed it right away because it broke my end of the day journaling workflow where I check off a few of my daily habits.

Not being able to check off my habits in my Daily Note has been a major pain. Thankfully, this is now fixed in Obsidian 1.6.4.

Well, I’m happy to announce that this is fixed in 1.6.4, which was released this week as an Early Access build to Obsidian Insiders (which means it should be rolling out to everyone shortly).

There are a couple of other important fixes (i.e. links in callouts now show up in the Backlinks section), and you can now publish the active note in Obsidian Publish by using the Publish Current File action.

There have also been some updates to the general installer to move to the current version of Electron, which I found speeds up the app quite a bit for me on my MacBook Pro. So if you have Insider access, now might be a good time to download the full installer instead of just updating via the app.

📚 Book Notes: Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

I mentioned James Clear up above, but he actually credits BJ Fogg with teaching him some of key principles of habits that he talks about in the book. BJ Fogg is a Behavior Scientist at Stanford Univeristy, and has written his own book, Tiny Habits.

I actually enjoyed this book even more than Atomic Habits as I love how BJ Fogg uses the Fogg Behavioral Model to explain why sometimes we take our desired action and sometimes we don’t. The key lies in three things: 1) our motivation to take the action, 2) our ability to do it, and 3) the prompt that was used.

It’s a great book that unlocked a lot of things for me. If you’re interested in creating better habits, this is a must-read.

My mind map book notes from Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.

If you want to download my mind map notes from this book, click here.

Weekly Poll

ConvertKit recently added polls, so I’m thinking of adding these to the weekly newsletter to help me write things that are more helpful to you, the reader. Since the newsletter is called Practical PKM, that seems like a great place to start 🙂

And if you care to elaborate, I’d love for you to hit reply to this email and tell me more 😉 Your feedback helps make the newsletter better!

— Mike

P.S. A quick update on the done-for-you Obsidian Vault with all my workflows: The vault is basically finished, and I’m about 80% done with the how-to lessons. There are about 40 lessons that all have detailed instructions and screenshots to help guide you in the right direction in implementing the workflows. It’s turning into a detailed PKM course inside of the vault 😂 It’s a lot of work, but I’m really happy with how it’s turning out. This is by far the most comprehensive product I’ve ever built, and I think people will love it 🙂 If you want to know as soon as it’s available, click ​this link​ to join the waitlist.