Member-only story
Smart People Don’t Chase Goals; They Create Limits
The Cult of Goal-Setting Is Failing You
A few years ago, I sat across from a friend at a late dinner. He was telling me about his new promotion, the big title, the bonus, the corner office. I remember watching his face as he described it. He looked like someone describing a story he’d once believed but no longer knew how to finish.
Later that night, walking home alone, I realized I had spent the last year of my life pursuing a goal I barely remembered choosing. I had grown proficient at producing, scaling, optimizing. I had systems. I had habits. But I was working in the absence of inner alignment. I was winning at a game I no longer wanted to play.
The goal hadn’t been wrong. It had just been handed to me, implicitly, by a world that measures progress in forward motion and not in depth.
That was the moment I began to question the entire architecture of ambition. Not whether it worked, but whether it asked the right things of a person. Whether a life could be constructed from milestones rather than methods, from outcomes rather than orientation.
Lately, I’ve paid closer attention to the boundaries that shape my work. The negative space. The rules. The constraints. I stopped asking where I wanted to go and started asking what I was…
