You trained for months and missed your target time because of a headwind on race day. You prepared for the interview, answered every question well, and the job went to an internal candidate. If you’ve been setting goals for a while, you’ve probably had this happen. You did your part, and the result still didn’t …
4 Lessons from the Stoics About Goals You Can’t Fully Control Read More »
We are often told that successful people know exactly what they want. Set a big goal, write it down, break it into milestones, track your progress, and stay focused. There is good evidence behind some of this advice: research on goal setting has found that specific, challenging goals can improve performance, particularly when people have …
When was the last time you looked at your goal list and felt excited? For a lot of us, it’s been a while. Somewhere along the way, our goals stopped feeling like possibilities and started feeling like obligations. We open the planner and a familiar heaviness sets in. I’m behind. I should be further along …
I first read The Alchemist about five years ago, during a stretch when I was deep in building GoalsOnTrack. I expected a light fable. What I found was something closer to a manual on how goals actually get achieved — and why most get abandoned. The story is simple. Santiago, a young shepherd in Spain, …
5 Lessons from The Alchemist About Achieving Goals Read More »
There’s a goal you’ve been carrying around for a while. Maybe it’s growing your business past the plateau it’s been stuck on, launching the course you keep outlining, or finally getting your health back on the calendar. You want it — genuinely, and you have for a long time. So why hasn’t wanting been enough? …
You Don’t Have a Motivation Problem. You Have a Decision Problem. Read More »
It’s no accident that goal-setting pervades so many areas of modern life. There are hundreds of research studies going back decades showing that setting goals can increase people’s performance. What are SMART goals? Many people have heard the goal-setting mantra that goals should be S.M.A.R.T: Despite this, few recognise the dangers of setting poor SMART …
Most people picture success as a straight line. A clean, confident climb from point A to point B, where talent meets opportunity and ambition does the rest. But anyone who has actually built something real — a business, a marriage, a career, a version of themselves worth respecting — knows that success is not a line. It …
Most of us think we choose our lives. We don’t, not really. We have some choice in where our attention goes, hour by hour, and our lives are what that adds up to. The loudest version of this is the obvious one. A Reviews.org survey published this year puts the average American at 186 phone checks a …
Life slowly becomes whatever we give our attention to Read More »
There’s a persistent myth that purpose is complicated. That it requires years of soul-searching, a perfectly crafted mission statement, or some lightning-bolt moment of clarity that suddenly reveals why you exist. But that hasn’t been my experience either personally or professionally. Purpose, at its core, is actually quite simple. What’s not simple is acting on …
It’s no secret that journaling is a powerful tool to help us get to know ourselves and live more intentionally. The sheer amount of benefits associated with journaling is frankly ridiculous, considering how simple it is. But today we’re going to be diving into how journaling can help us become better versions of ourselves. Specifically, we’re going …
