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1
Why Goal Setting Is Broken
It was raining as the woman climbed out of her plane, her legs shaky from the long flight. She looked around, taking in the unfamiliar surroundings, unsure of where she was. She had landed in a big field with a beautiful view of woodland and water. This definitely didn't look like Paris, her intended destination. But she didn't have much time to enjoy the panorama; soon her plane was surrounded by hundreds of locals, curious to meet the famous Miss Amelia Earhart. When a farmer asked her, "Have you flown far?" she replied: "From America."
Yes, she had done it: Though technical issues with her plane and bad weather had forced her to land in Northern Ireland, she had become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.
Amelia Earhart is renowned for this incredible feat, but few people know that she had made the same trip less than five years prior, albeit in very different circumstances. Then unable to make a living as a pilot, she was working as a social worker for low-income immigrants when she received a strange phone call: She could be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, but she would not be allowed to pilot the plane-she was to be a mere passenger. The female passenger who was initially supposed to fly with them had deemed the journey too risky.
Earhart was already an experienced aviator; she could have turned down the offer and waited for a better opportunity. But she said yes and negotiated to be in charge of the logbook so she would at least have an active role. It was this first experience that allowed her to unlock the necessary resources to try to cross the Atlantic again, this time with her own plane.
Even less known are the myriad of other experiments she performed outside of aviation. Flying was expensive, so Earhart worked as a clerk for a telephone company. She ventured into portrait photography with a friend, and when that project failed, she launched a trucking business with another friend. After she became a celebrity, she designed a functional clothing line providing comfortable yet elegant pants "for the woman who lives actively." She worked as a consultant at Purdue University to support women in pursuing traditionally male careers. She also experimented in her personal life. When she married publisher George Palmer Putnam, she told him she would not be bound by "any medieval code of faithfulness" and openly took fellow aviator Gene Vidal as a lover.
And those notes she captured during her first transatlantic flight? She published them as her first book.
We are told that success is the result of extraordinary gifts or exceptional grit. But rather than some innate quality or the single-minded pursuit of a big dream, endless curiosity is what enabled Amelia Earhart to discover her path. She saw "liking to experiment" as a common thread driving her actions in life-"the something inside me that has always liked to try new things." She was sometimes scared of failing, but she embraced her fears. She was ambitious, and yet she cared about having a positive impact. She was driven, and yet she did not focus on an end goal. She considered adventure to be worthwhile in itself. All those other facets of her life-a life of fertile uncertainty-are rarely mentioned in history books, and yet it is precisely the fact that Earhart swerved many times in the course of becoming an aviator that makes her life so extraordinary. She consistently reinvented her career, questioned the status quo, and sought to elevate others as she forged her own path.
We were all born with this sense of adventure. It's in children's nature to experiment and explore the unknown. They learn first and foremost through movement, which is considered the foundational skill for developing emotional, cognitive, and social skills. Children collect and connect information by constantly scouting their environment. They try activities beyond their capabilities, they attempt to predict the effects of their actions, and they keep asking "Why?"-in fact, children ask more than a hundred questions per hour on average. By failing fast and often, they learn from every experience to propel themselves forward. Children are insatiable adventurers.
But then something changes. We are taught to perform, in both meanings of the word: to achieve specific targets whether in school or at work, but also to present ourselves in a way that conforms with societal expectations. While some manage to preserve an attitude of childlike adventure, keeping their options open, always on the lookout for hints of what may be coming, most of us cling to what we know. When we consider our professional future, we seek a legible story, one that provides the appearance of stability, with a cohesive narrative and clear steps to success. If everything goes well, we get hired to provide answers based on our expertise-not questions based on our curiosity. We begin caring about what people think of us and we project an image of confidence, focusing on self-packaging over self-improvement. We welcome anything that provides the perception of control-whether it's a productivity tool, a time management method, or a goal-setting framework.
This common shift from boundless curiosity to narrow determination is at the heart of why the traditional approach to goals keeps on letting us down; it impedes our creativity and prevents us from seeing and seizing new opportunities.
The Trap of Linear Goals
Philosophers were already discussing goal setting more than two thousand years ago. "Let all your efforts be directed to something, let it keep that end in view," advised Seneca. For Epictetus, goal setting was a matter of clarity and determination: "First say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do."
In the 1960s, American psychologist Edwin Locke was inspired by the work of those ancient philosophers. His goal-setting theory set off a flurry of research into the relationship between goals and performance. One of those goal-setting frameworks, devised in the early 1980s, advocated for specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and timely goals-which you may have heard of as SMART goals. This framework is still used to this day by thousands of companies around the world and has escaped the sphere of management to permeate the sphere of personal development.
All these approaches to goal setting are based on linear goals: they were created for controlled environments that lend to readily measurable outcomes with predictable timelines.
The linear way is wildly out of sync with the lives we live today. The challenges we're facing and the dreams we're pursuing are increasingly hard to define, measure, and pin to a set schedule. In fact, a common challenge for many people these days is feeling stuck when it comes to their next steps: instead of providing a motivating force, the idea of setting a well-defined goal is paralyzing. When the future is uncertain, the neat parameters of rigid goal-setting frameworks are of little help; it feels like throwing darts without a target to aim at.
This lack of clarity in a world that keeps on changing has led to a widespread ambivalence toward goals. As journalist Amil Niazi put it: "No goals, just vibes." Some have even proclaimed the end of ambition, a new era where the concept of job satisfaction has become a paradox.
But ambition isn't broken. It is still what it has always been: the innate human desire for growth, a desire that is both universal and highly personal. People aren't broken, either. They still crave creativity and connection. It's the way we set goals that's broken.
Notice the vocabulary we use. Goals drive us forward, we set out to achieve our goals, we make progress toward a goal. Those are called orientational metaphors-figurative expressions that involve spatial relationships. Setting a linear goal entails defining a target state in the future and mapping out the steps to get there. Success is defined as arriving at the target.
Because they conflate ambition with the single-minded pursuit of an end destination, traditional methods of pursuing goals have an effect counter to their intent: they create a discouraging perspective where we are far from success. Our satisfaction-the best version of ourselves-lies somewhere in the future. There are (at least) three other glaring flaws of linear goals:
Linear goals stimulate fear. Starting something new is daunting, especially when it lies far outside our comfort zone. Because we lack the expertise that comes with experience, we're not sure where to begin. Sometimes the sheer number of options leads to analysis paralysis. We become so overwhelmed with choices that we are unable to take action. Other times, we feel like we're not qualified enough, and we succumb to self-doubt. We think we don't have the necessary time or financial resources. Or we may start imagining what will happen if we fail, and anxiety stops us in our tracks.
Linear goals encourage toxic productivity. Researchers who explored our relationship to idleness found that "many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy." Focused on relentless plotting and execution, we may develop an overly strict mentality in which we believe that if we don't complete each task, everything will fall apart. We work long hours, we feel guilty for taking breaks, we cancel on friends to do more work. We set unrealistic deadlines and blame ourselves when we miss them. We research the perfect productivity tool instead of simply asking how we feel. We work while sick. Anything to avoid slowing down on the treadmill of success. This emphasis on speed over sustainable progress leaves us mentally drained and, ironically, less productive.
Linear goals breed competition and isolation. When everyone around us is climbing the same ladder, scrambling over one another, we become competitive for all the wrong reasons. Even when we think of goals as our own individual ladder, we look at others on theirs and race toward the top. Either way, linear goals promote an individualistic mentality that can make us view potential collaborators as competitors, leading to alienation, lack of support, and fewer opportunities. The constant comparison and focus on individual achievement prevent us from pooling our resources and learning from one another, to the detriment of our careers and communities.
That is partly why ambition has become something of a dirty word. We assume that being ambitious means following a pre-written script and climbing a never-ending ladder, sometimes at the expense of other people. This flaw is not new, but modern life has created a giant public leaderboard that amplifies the artificial need to compete. Because of social media, we compare ourselves to our peers more than ever before. We are notified of the professional feats of not just our colleagues but all the people we studied with in school. We receive constant reminders of the supposedly perfect lives of everyone in our network. And so our definition of success keeps on ballooning as we progress.
This phenomenon is called the Red Queen effect. In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice says to the Queen: "In our country, you'd generally get to somewhere else-if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." To which the Queen replies: "A slow sort of country! Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Our collective focus on the ladder of success is what gave rise to the proverbial rat race of modern life: if only we can climb one more step-if only we can get that promotion, give that big presentation, grow our online audience, hire a team, buy that house-then we will finally feel at peace.
Our goals are often not even our own; we borrow them from peers, celebrities, and what we imagine society expects from us. French philosopher René Girard called this phenomenon mimetic desire: we desire something because we see others desiring it. In other words, our goals mimic the goals of others.
And of course it is impossible not to assess our game progression relative to other players-except that the leaderboard is rigged, and everyone is showing only a distorted version of their lives, snapshots of manufactured happiness where all the struggle and the doubt have been edited out.
Fear of failure causes us to endlessly stop and start, resulting in an uneven path where we keep going back to our comfort zone before trying to progress again. Toxic productivity leads to burnout, creating ups and downs. Working in isolation means we lack the support networks to help smooth the way.
Following that wild, twisted path with its intense highs and lows has repercussions. We may progress, but we feel like we're constantly failing. And so instead of inspiring audacious next steps, our goals spark anxiety (What if I don't succeed?), apathy (Why care when the journey ahead is all mapped out already?) and anger (Why am I forced to play this game?).
But this breakdown of old ways isn't a crisis. It's a rare chance to improve the way we explore our ambitions.
Between Stimulus and Response
Imagine, for a moment, that you are traveling alone on a long-leg airline flight with no onboard Wi-Fi. There you are at 30,000 feet, suspended in the sky, transitioning from one place to another, neither here nor there. The places and people who normally define and control your daily life are miles away. You don't know exactly what will happen after you land, but there's no way to rush to your destination to find out.
How do you react to this environment?
Response 1: Discomfort, fear, helplessness. The fact is, you're hurtling along at 30,000 feet in a tin can with someone else at the helm. You knock back alcohol to dull your fear or try to sleep away your anxiety. You check out to the greatest degree possible and pray to a higher power that the pilot manages to land the plane.
Or...
Response 2: Delight, calm, curiosity. Removed from your everyday, you find yourself relaxing-yes, even in that uncomfortable seat. In this strange space, you feel an invigorating sense of possibility. You might crack a book you've been curious about but had no time for. Watch a movie that friends would be surprised to see you enjoy. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Maybe you write in your journal, reflecting on what's passed and mulling over what's to come. Freed from your usual duties, released from the constraints of your day-to-day identity, you find the mental space to do something a little bit different.
The flight I have just described is a liminal space-an in-between territory where the old rules governing our choices no longer apply. Life is full of these moments, and the degree to which we learn to reap their lessons is the degree to which we grow and improve our lives.
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