2021 Goal Review

Since 2014, I’ve published a set of annual goals out into the public. These goals have ranged from simple things like learning to meditate, or lifting goals, to broad-reaching goals like “establish an intentional living community.”

By all public appearances, 2021 was no different. I posted a summary of the goals I would be keeping for the year on my blog.

But this year, I did another thing, a secret thing. Enthralled by a bewitching question, I decided to conduct an hubristic experiment. I felt that if I shared my experiment, my friends and family would scoff and think how prideful I was, and even the gods themselves might turn their eyes toward me in spite. So I retreated into the shadows to craft a secret list of goals. A much longer list of goals. A much, much longer list of goals.

The Question: How far can I push it?

Is it possible to complete a substantially extended list of goals? 2, 3, 5 times as many? And if I pull out all the stops and analyze how these goals fit together, how I will keep motivated, can I do it? What can I accomplish if I bring to bear everything I’ve learned about goal setting, habit formation, motivation, planning, and discipline?

The theory: I have tracked my annual goals for many years and analyzed them regularly. I know why I fail at achieving my goals intimately and publicly. I’m not shy about it. I also know what the circumstances are for success. In theory, I could overcome timing problems with good planning, overcome motivation by swapping focuses and overcome burnout by really examining the reason for each goal ahead of time. 

So with hubris and secrecy, I forged my list of goals.

The Setup:

Here is the secret list of goals, at long last revealed.

My secret spreadsheet had 67 goals across 9 categories at the start of the year. After moving to Jackson, I added 3 additional goals, rounding the total out to 70.  For each goal, I added metadata. Every goal had 1) an emotional theme, 2) a regularly updated cell describing the next step for the goal, 3) a score for how much social support I needed to complete, 4) an estimate of how quickly the goal could be completed, 5) an estimate of monetary resources, and 6) a cross-mapping of complementary goals. Much of the metadata was helpful in planning but did not ultimately matter for the completion. More thoughts on this later.

The goals fall into 9 categories, with the Fun category the catch-all and largest.

A bit of an anomaly in the graph above is the Private category, which includes goals that I’ve decided not to share publicly, though I may tell you about them privately if I’m feeling flirty. These items fit into other existing categories, but I’ve separated them into their own bucket for purposes of this post.


Results:

Resounding success. I succeeded at 39  goals, abandoned 8, did not complete 12, and still have 12 inflight. Of the inflight projects, I suspect 2 will be successful, and the rest failures or partial successes. 

I’m genuinely surprised by this result, partly because I think had you explained to me 3 years ago that I could complete nearly 40 goals in a year, I wouldn’t have believed you. It seems audacious to write it, but I know every step I took to complete this list and could easily explain why the goals I failed to achieve were failures. My upfront work was a success. My planning eliminated the bottleneck of having a ton of goals, and I more or less successfully distributed my goals across the year.


Reflections:

Goal Difficulty: If you haven’t yet looked at the list of goals, please do. It could be easy to assume that this experiment was mostly an exercise in setting easy goals with this many goals. However, I think the list speaks to difficulty more directly than anything I can write here. Undoubtedly, some of the items on the list were easier than others, but none of them were trivial to me. 

Taking one that would be easy for most people, “buy new clothes,” this item is wrapped up in childhood trauma, self-image and self-worth irrationality, and a paralyzing desire to be accepted. It’s not ideal to be a man in his 30’s that can’t shop because of how guilty you feel spending money on yourself. Nonetheless, I knew I needed to change, and this year, I bought myself a fun, new, rather feminine sweater that I love, shoes that I think are cool, comfortable shorts, shirts that fit my body, and a jacket that repels the rain. Buying these clothes is a wild success, even if it doesn’t appear to be from the outside. It’s a baby step, but it’s mine.

On the flip side, there are goals on the list that were easier to achieve for me than they would be for others. “One month in Mexico” is one of those goals. I had a remote job, savings, a partner to help with planning, some poor Spanish-speaking skills, and the risk tolerance to roll the dice on lousy internet. A trip into unknown territory in a foreign country would be wild and far outside the comfort range for many people, but I found it invigorating and overall simple.

There are goals on my list that were hard for me and would be hard for everyone. I challenge my readers to perform a front lever on the gymnastics rings. This movement came at the end of a year of building the power of pull-ups, muscle-ups, lat pull-downs, and daily practice for nearly 3 months, and I still can’t consistently nail the movement.

Goal difficulty is relative. If you are in shape, it’s easier to set goals for heavy lifts and cardio. If you aren’t, any exercise goals will be challenging because you don’t have the habits or lifestyle to match–you must undergo an internal culture change from someone for whom fitness doesn’t matter to become someone who values it deeply. Identifying whether this culture change is necessary to achieve your goal is a critical and overlooked feature of setting goals. 

Abandoning Goals: I have a few goals that I abandon every year. This year, all of my abandoned goals come from being either blocked or from learning further information that made the goal no longer desirable. As an example of being blocked, I could not begin converting my garage into an ADU because I moved from Seattle to Jackson. As an example of a no longer desirable goal, I kept running into more and more evidence of people injuring themselves on the path to the one-armed pull-up, and I just didn’t want the risk. I’m not a climber, and I had no real purpose for the goal except to resolve the question, “can I do it?” So, I set aside one-armed pull-ups and didn’t look back.

In previous goal reviews, I lumped abandoned goals into failed goals. This year, because of volume, I separated them. I still see abandoned goals as failures, but I don’t see failures as bad. Instead, they are good data and help inform my future goal setting. 

Mostly abandoned goals are a result of bad planning and wrong expectations. For example, I expected to be in Seattle for most of the year. Instead, I moved to Mississippi in the summer. This means that my planning in December 2020 did not account for the possibility of a significant move, and it means that several goals ultimately failed.

People mistakenly treat abandoned goals as failed goals. I think this is because most people who set annual goals don’t fail at them; they abandon them. Most people don’t know how to pick a goal back up once their first attempt has failed, don’t know how to change themselves and their habits to make the goal easy, and aren’t rigorous in understanding that abandoning a goal is fundamentally different than trying to complete something repeatedly throughout a year and still missing the mark. Both abandons and failures are informative and share the overlapping feature of “did not complete the goal” but typically have different reasons for why. Those differences are relevant for future goal planning.

Abandoned goals help inform you on the process it will take to complete a goal, the road ahead will look like, and doing robust enough research before committing. Failure to do those things ahead of time increases the likelihood of abandoned goals. It’s no surprise that you abandon your weight loss goal when you haven’t even thought about what it will feel like to eat chicken breast and rice again for dinner for the 3rd time in a week.

Contrary to abandoning goals, failures typically result from misunderstanding difficulty and the time required to complete a goal. “Starting a Weekend Business” requires you to spend a significant amount of time thinking about your side hustle, testing it, raising starting capital, and sacrificing your weekends to make money. This is complex, and you can fail at many steps of the process (I did!) and still fail for other reasons like not anticipating time constraints, like new remodeling work on a new house (that’s me!). Failures are dynamic, while abandons are predictable.

Failures: The failures this year are odd. Having written above that failures are dynamic, the failures happened for somewhat boring and consistent reasons this year. All of the failures can be explained this year by either lack of time or interest relative to other goals and activities. Take “Submit 4 black belts.” This is a challenging goal, but I didn’t complete it at least because I didn’t train much jiu-jitsu this year. I was blocked because of COVID restrictions, blocked again by free time restrictions moving out of Seattle and into Jackson, then more consistently blocked by heavy workload at a new job, then heavy workload in a new role requiring travel. In theory, I could have completed this goal if I had devoted significant time and money, and effort to it, but I had other goals and objectives. Thus my jiu-jitsu hasn’t improved as much as it could because my training has been inconsistent. 

But consistent training wouldn’t have been enough since it leaves aside the giant skill gap between me and most black belts. From one perspective, this gap is not as severe as the gap between me and new white belts, but from another perspective, I am as much drowning in the clutches of a black belt as a white belt would be. To complete this goal, I would have needed to be singularly focused and consistent in my training to find a single strategy that I could run against black belts to achieve this goal. One move that works because I devoted ridiculous time to complete it. My training routine was nowhere near this, so alas, I only subbed one black belt and got close to 1 more. For even further context, this is a far different goal than catching the same black belt again with the same move, which I doubt I could achieve (again pointing to the skill gap between where I’m at and where black belts are).

Furthermore, I’m not sure the approach I describe above is worth it. The purpose of jiu-jitsu isn’t just to be good at one move that you can spam to great success in the training gym. If there is a purpose, it’s to be a well-rounded grappler. I want a thousand weapons that I can deploy dynamically, not just one move requiring the perfect setup. The fast route to achieving this year’s goal could be educational, but it falls far short of the bigger goal of mastery in jiu-jitsu.

Returning to failed goals in general, many of the failed goals on this list fit the prioritization/timing problem. I chose to do other goals over these. This half of the failures is primarily because of lousy foresight and bad planning. It’s obvious in retrospect that my ability to handstand takes up a similar slot as the gymnastics rings work, but I thought I could get by with just 15 minutes of daily training or something. It was a bad plan, and I should have known better!

The other half of my failures are from diminished interest. I think Spanish is fun, but I just didn’t want to structure my days once I moved to Jackson to build in 30 minutes of Spanish training. Too much of my life was in flux, and I needed the flexibility just to drink coffee and think in the morning. Additionally, I didn’t want to level up into needing a language teacher, which is another time commitment. Writing book reviews and tracking calories failed for the same reason. While they would have been productive activities, I just wanted to do other work more. I was more interested in my other goals and the many activities outside of my goal list. 

Metadata: When I first wrote the goals, I thought having more metadata categories would be helpful. I scored the goals, compared them, and tried to load balance the timing and difficulty of the list. This planning fell apart when it hit the real world. It wasn’t helpful to track cost, how time-consuming I thought completing the goal would be, or how much psychological resistance I would have. I would either do the goal and pay the time and money, or I wouldn’t. The number didn’t matter.

The information that did matter was the emotional theme that the goal fulfilled. First, it kept me very motivated. I could think of myself as developing thematically instead of just a one-off goal. It was good to stare at the gymnastics rings and strap on the 60-pound weight vest and think, “I am fucking powerful. I will do this”, or to push through my resistance to buying clothes by thinking, “Do you want to be sexy or not?” Those themes helped tremendously with self-talk and internal motivation.

The emotional theme also helped with the problem of goal volume. Each emotive space seems to have a separate energy well. So on any given day, if I felt that one emotional well was low, say “be sexy,” I could jump over into the well of “War and Peace” or “Masculinity,” which was full and ready to be used. Jumping energy wells kept my days productive, even though they were varied. 

I used this energy well method to great effect by building my schedule around different moods and pivoting when I couldn’t draw on the proper emotion to get the work done. Since these were year-long goals and I know my emotional capacities, I could trust that my motivation would wax again and I’d be ready to make progress. It’s a common mistake to try to force yourself to keep the same schedule over and over again while being indifferent to your mood and the realities of who you are that day. While I approve of having a bit of Stoic separation from yourself, I think it’s a higher level of play to work with and around your emotional state and an even higher level of play to be able to prime yourself into the proper emotional well. 

Archetypes as inspiration: As part of goal setting, I selected the archetype “Philosopher-King” as an archetype worth embodying in the world and set the task of creating goals that put me further on the path of fulfilling that archetype. I also defined clear success signs of fulfillment of that archetype and used those as grist for the mill when defining my 2021 goals. You can find my work on that here.

This was my first time experimenting with this practice, and it far exceeded my expectations. I’ve long held that gender scripts aren’t real, but they are useful. I now think the same about archetypal thinking. Both are a type of psychomagic that can help empower you to take action or resist action where you would otherwise not. I intend to explore archetypal models further in my 2022 goal setting and even may define a goal of further exploration as a 2022 goal. 

Goal I am most proud of: Ring Muscle-Up. The technique and pure power I needed to hit this movement were far more than you understand expected. I remember distinctly the moment it happened. I was out in the garage lifting with Grey and Mary on a Wednesday morning. I put my hands on the rings and I just sort of knew that it had clicked overnight and that I’d be able to hit the transition. And then I just did it as though I’d always known how to do it. 

I love this goal because I think this is a magical body movement, one that feels impossible when you first start. It’s a movement that relies on counterintuitive starting (you hang off your wrists in the false grip to start the movement), requires timing to hit the transition, and substantial power to complete the whole movement. It’s the first movement I’ve learned outside of martial arts that I felt fundamentally relies on putting all the pieces together to make it work. In contrast, when you are lifting, if your form is broken, you injure yourself or can’t pull as heavily. If you are doing the muscle-up wrong, you simply can’t do the movement. 

Discipline is Bullshit, but Necessary: Most people I know set goals and then whip themselves into discipline about completing the goal. They hand half of themselves a whip, and the other half suffers while the goal is complete. While this can be successful in the short term, this is the wrong way to complete long-term goals. It nearly always fails, in part because it’s not maintainable. There’s only so long you are willing to put up with chastising yourself because you fight back, you slip up, and willpower drains over time until you just put down the whip. This is defeating because you tried hard while holding the whip, but you still failed. 

I think this attitude toward disciplining yourself toward your goals is everywhere in the goal-setting literature. It’s present in most life advice, whether from parents, mentors, or coaches. It shows how we advise men to be men and women to be women. It’s right there in Oprah, Tim Ferriss, Jocko Willink, and so many other life coaches. It’s assumed in diet culture, a fundamental attitude in most lifting programs, and is ripped almost directly from the Puritan work ethic. The motto is “do better because you are bad, you lazy slob.” This view of getting goals done is bullshit and not even close to the best way to do it. But…

It’s extremely useful to improve your willpower, learn discipline, and get control of your life. You must learn this if you hope to succeed in your life. Bad habits do not break themselves. It’s the first tool you need to learn to achieve your goals, but it won’t get you to the finish line. Not consistently, certainly not with joy, and not without turning your life into a life of punishment. 

The discipline mindset runs afoul in assuming that it’s the only and best way to set goals. How could that be? It’s the method that most people deploy for their new year’s resolutions, and so many of those fail within the first month. They rely heavily on forcing themselves to get something done. What a sad way to live!

Loving the Process: Instead of throwing yourself on the rack of discipline, you must set goals that create processes that you love. Finding methods you love is substantially more challenging than just picking a target and lashing yourself until you get to your goal. It requires you to think honestly about what would cause you to do the work even on a day when you don’t want to. You can’t merely set a target. You must know that the days you take journeying toward the target are rich and worthwhile, too. 

Notice how odd this pattern is: someone loves the idea of being well-read, of reading and knowing the classics. So they set a goal of reading 20 classic books. Then they whip themselves in January to read, are sad when they have turned something they love into a job, and by the end of January, have turned something they were excited about into something worth avoiding. As a result, they don’t read any classic books but set out to do it again next year. How wild is that?

But there is another way. That way requires you to give a shit about yourself, not just the person who’s read 20 books, but the person who is choosing to read before bed, who joins a book club, who has conversations on reddit about Emily Bronte, the you transformed by exposure to great art. And you need to think about who that person is on a Wednesday at 7 pm, who they are on a Saturday at 10 am, how they will know the smell of an old book, what bookmark they use, and how they will feel when Ishmael won’t stop talking about whaling boats for 30 pages. 

You must think about the person who will love the process of completing the goal. Because loving the process is how you achieve a goal without any discipline at all. 

Here’s an example: I love kinetic learning. I love the process of figuring out how to do stuff with my body in the world. I love seeing the boundaries, figuring out how to move differently, and connecting with my body. But, contrary to how it appears now that I’ve been doing jiu-jitsu and regularly lifting for many years, I am not a naturally athletic person. I don’t have the knack. Instead, I have the joy of discovering my body’s limits, exploring them, and pushing the boundaries.

I set the goal of doing a ring front lever not because I was thrilled by the idea of doing a front lever. I wasn’t setting out to show off, though that’s certainly a fun thing! Instead, I was excited about what I would learn along the way. I was excited to laugh about how stupidly hard it was, how even just a tucked front lever was exhausting. I was interested in how my shoulders would feel with all this rotation (stronger and more stable than ever) and about whether I would even be able to accomplish the goal if I dedicated the time to it. I didn’t know about the hundreds of failures, the technique videos, the lat strains, and the stretching I would need to comfort my achy shoulders, but I was delighted and frustrated and delighted by the frustrations by these things along the way. All I knew was I wanted to point my face toward the front lever and explore the territory.

Were there days I didn’t want to practice? Yes! Absolutely yes! I mostly practiced anyway on those days, but I usually switched it up some. I asked more questions “Can I do it with one leg extended and the other tucked? Am I equal on both sides? How much harder is it if I do it slower?” That got the curiosity juices stirring again, and off I went. 

This year, I had a process for every goal I completed. I had a space I could explore and questions I could ask to keep me engaged. When it got boring, I put it down for a bit or leaned in further into my curiosity. Ultimately, this is what made completing so many goals possible. It was direct engagement with the deeper question: “Am I able?” 

People fail at goals because they only want the outcome. They want to be stronger, more intelligent, wiser but don’t want to discover themselves on the way. So piling on, their primary vehicle for success is a motto that says just go harder, drive through the suffering, and it’s no wonder so many people fail. It’s not fun, it’s not sustainable, and it is focused on the wrong thing.

Obvious in retrospect: Most of what I have to say about goals is obvious in retrospect. The reason that meditation started happening for me was I wanted it. Not to be a meditator, but I wanted to sit and meditate. Goals are hard to achieve when you don’t have an emotional attachment to them, i.e., they don’t matter to you. Duh! 

The not-so-obvious insight I’ve learned after years of setting annual goals, and a year of trying to complete a giant volume of goals, is that you have to take all those obvious-in-retrospect elements and include them in your planning. You must make time and space for that reflection before beginning your goals. Your goals must have a level of rigor beyond what you’ve been taught, but once they do, you will have no trouble completing them.

No goal should make it onto your list without the following features:

SMART: It needs to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. (This is where most goal advice found on the internet stops).

Make it emotional: You will be transformed by the activity taken to achieve the goal. So you must give a shit about the outcome, and you must know what emotions are powering you to do that thing and be able to call them up when you need them. 

The Goal must support who you are becoming: You need to have a broader sense of what accomplishing this goal will mean in the context of who you are and who you are becoming. This can be a big thing, “I am someone who loves being outside, and I’m not going to let something like allergies get in my way” or a little thing, “I just want to be a person who smells good, so I’m going to explore cologne options.” 

Describe what you’ll love about the process: Achieving most goals takes time. If you don’t love to read, love stories, love learning, setting a goal to read 25 books will be agonizing. Think about how nice it will be to put down your phone and read a book instead of looking at your phone as you lay in bed. Think about talking to the author about their book when they are doing their AMA. Daydream about seeing that cute girl at the coffee shop while you are there reading Proust. Whatever gets you thinking about how your life will be while you do the activity helps you understand what you love about the process. 

But seriously, are these goals hard enough?: No. I don’t think so.

I don’t want to stop building these lists, and I even plan to create a long list next year. I want to think about my year and who I can become. But this year was a discovery year for me. When I look at my list from this year, I see it now as a list that primarily consists of what I’ve called hygienic goals. These goals represent doing things that create good life hygiene for me. As I wrote above, that’s not the case for everyone, but this is about me and my life. In many ways, setting these goals at the beginning of the year and achieving them one by one over the year is the minimum I need to live a good life on my terms.

But this year built a new desire in me, a desire to see how far I can push it. I’m now asking myself, “what does a wholesale level up to my life look like?” Next year, I want to design some challenging goals. So difficult that others would look and say, “Seriously? Is that possible?” I want to have an eye toward the process being rewarding, even when it is difficult, but the outcome being something that my friends and family would say, “How did he do that?”

While talking with Mary about the last ten years and the process of developing annual goals, she said, “Over the last ten years, you’ve developed a little machine that causes reality to warp. You turn the machine on, input the goal parameters, and through the process of goal completion and analysis, out pops a completed goal. So why aren’t you using your reality-warping machine for bigger things?” 

Why indeed? Her question is provocative and scary. Following through is far riskier than the way I’ve set goals before. I’m contemplating dialing up these goals’ effort, emotional engagement, and meaning. I will care a lot more if I fail at these new, super goals.

But that’s the game, isn’t it? I am a student of growth, a follower of the eudaimonic gods, and if I want to continue developing and showing others how to grow and develop, I need to put more skin in the game. 

Other things that I’m happy that I did this year that weren’t on the list: 

I completed a 15lb weight loss diet with Ben. (He’s lost a lot more because he’s a badass). 

I’m finally bench-pressing over 200. My bench has always been low, but after half a year of gymnastics rings work, it’s blowing up.

I moved to Mississippi! This is an incredible thing, and I’m so grateful for the slack that I’ve found as a result. People here are kind, the food is good, the weather is warm. 

I got my wish for a more intentional living community. We live next door (we share a fence!) to my sister and brother-in-law, and my parents-in-law are living with us through December. 

Celebrated 10 years of marriage! This is genuinely incredible, and every day is a new adventure. One of the great pleasures of this year has been reflecting on who we’ve been over the last ten years and dreaming about who we will become over the next ten. 

I built another sauna! And a cold plunge! I continue to be so grateful for the opportunity to learn to be handy the hard way with our house remodel. It’s made me more confident and excited to take on personal projects like these. 

I stepped on a sea urchin! This is weird, but I’ve always wondered what the big deal was. Let me tell you, urchin venom is real, and it hurts! Also, did you know you can’t directly remove urchin’s spines? You have to leave them in or melt them with vinegar! 

I drank rum out of a coconut! This was as cool as I thought it would be. Very bougie! But also very middle-class fake bougie!

Started the quest to describe meaning and how we should live. This project has completely captivated me, and I’m delighted to be working on it. I don’t know if I’ll contribute anything particularly unique to the problem, but it seems like a remarkably underdeveloped space. 

Embraced my great joy of facilitating and began working on making a career of it. Seriously, years of running tabletop games, theatre, Gottman training, and stakeholder management have made me genuinely good at this. I’m excited to learn and develop more. 

Discovered the Mystery of the Existentialists. Where did all the existentialists go after the ’60s? Why didn’t their work continue? Or did it shatter into a thousand subdisciplines? It’s sort of baffling! 

Traveled more for work than ever! Of course, this has its pros and cons, but after being cooped up for COVID, it’s been fun to see a few more cities and be in person with people again. 

I made friends with a Tibetian Lama. This was a surprise, but there is a growing Buddhist community down here in Mississippi, and I’m enjoying getting involved. 

Teaching jiu-jitsu kids and adult class. I’m helping teach at my new gym and loving the opportunity. Kids learn so quickly, and I love the adults’ energy to learn something new. It’s been fun to teach about principles alongside how to do the movements. Thanks, Ryan Hall! 

Helped with guest house remodel. I have not been the primary worker on the guest house remodel, but I’ve nonetheless enjoyed helping on the project. I’m looking forward to showing off before and after pictures!

Visited a Civil War museum/park. The Vicksburg National Military Park is this beautiful, expansive park that has you drive through the battlefield of a critical Civil War battle. It puts in the moment and space in a way that other museums just don’t. 

Conclusion: 

I feel like a different person than I was at the start of this last year. I feel like I have more confidence, direction, and understanding of who I want to become. This year has been so full and so rich. So much travel, so much learning, so much novelty. I’m genuinely proud of who I have become, and I’m excited to see what more this life has for me.