Stupid Goals Pursued Intelligently

It's the start of a new year and you find this nagging monkey on your back that keeps yelling about resolutions and that you should have them.

You comply. The monkey must stop yelling.

You decide, hastily, that it's well worth your time to start running, maybe even do a marathon, even though you hate running and would rather eat glass professionally. But no matter, you have a goal now! You go back to your job and when colleagues ask about your new year goals, you proudly tell them about the marathon.

They clap. Wow! What an admirable goal.

Motivated by the validation, you go and buy new shoes, you polish off the ol' Garmin you once wore and you get a habit tracker app subscription along with the new edition of the Runner's Digest. You listen to Andrew Huberman and find out what the best pre- and post-workout meals are. Everything is ready. You have the perfect system to do this.

The alarm blares, it's 05:30, and you have to get up to run. You do. You hate it. You do it again. You still hate it. It's middle February and you haven't gone running in a week. Your ankle is sore and you don't feel like nursing it. If it gets better, you'll have to run again. You go back to work and tell everyone you really tried but the injury is stopping you. They still admire your tenacity. Maybe next year.

But you will fail again next year. You might even run a marathon but you will still have failed. Because you know that you hate running and that you can't see yourself running one more step after that damned marathon is done.

Two goals, not one

What's actually happening is worse than simply choosing the wrong goal. Within you, there are two sets of goals operating simultaneously. The one you thought you picked, and the real one.

The conscious goal was to run a marathon. It's borrowed, sounds impressive, and you hate it.

The subconscious, real goals were:

• Be seen as someone who sets ambitious goals
• Get social validation from colleagues
• Assume the identity of a "disciplined person" without real risk
• Protect yourself from attempting something you genuinely care about

The ankle injury was a dignified exit that preserved the identity of "someone who tries" without requiring them to actually become someone who runs.

The would-be runner achieved their goals. Just not the ones they said aloud.

The real problem

Don't get me wrong, running a marathon isn't bad. In fact, it's admirable and worth pursuing but only if it's a genuine aspiration. Complying with the yelling monkey happened because you couldn't imagine telling people you still need time to decide who you are. Only with that knowledge can one pursue anything worthwhile.

No, the would-be runner decided that the social validation must happen. They would rather be a caricature executing someone else's definition of worthiness than be uncomfortable.

Understand this: even though you had the sophistication in the pursuit, the goal was stupid. You had the new shoes, habit tracker and the Huberman protocols. You had a system. The problem wasn't your capacity to achieve. It was choosing what to achieve in the first place.

This is what stupid goals pursued intelligently look like.

Choosing is much harder than pursuing. This is because goals are identity choices and pursuit is amoral mechanics. Your subconscious goal-seeking system is brilliant at execution. Point it at a well-defined target and it will efficiently take you there. It doesn't evaluate whether the target is worth pursuing.

That's your job.

Why you can't force it

Your identity is not who you aspire to be. It's who your daily choices reveal you to be, right now.

The person choosing snacks and watching TV over running has an identity of "comfort-seeker". When they set the marathon goal, they're asking their brain to pursue a target that requires being someone else entirely. Someone who tolerates discomfort, who persists despite looking foolish, and who cares more about the thing than the appearance of caring about the thing.

This is where willpower fails. It's not the pursuit of the goal that's being fought. You're fighting your brain's entire reward structure, optimised over years for comfort and validation. The would-be runner isn't weak. They're neurologically misaligned. Their goal requires an identity their brain hasn't built and will actively resist building.

Every time they chose the couch over the run, they reinforced who they already were. The comfort-seeker identity got stronger. The brain learned: this is who we are.

You cannot will yourself into a different identity through downstream actions. You can force the behaviour. You cannot force becoming someone to whom the behaviour comes naturally.

So what now smart guy?

I know, we have arrived at a paradox.

If identity determines which goals your brain will pursue, and your brain reinforces existing identity through every choice, and downstream actions can't change upstream identity, how the hell does anyone ever change?

This is where most advice fails. "Just be more disciplined" is asking you to overpower your own neurology. "Visualise success" is asking your brain to want something it's optimised against wanting. "Start small" still requires your identity to permit the direction of travel.

But the paradox has two exits.

Exit One: Find what's already yours

The first exit is simple: you don't need to change your identity. You need to see it clearly.

The would-be runner's problem wasn't that they needed to become a runner. They just weren't one. Running was never theirs. They borrowed the goal from impressive people they wanted to imitate. Their brain knew this even when they didn't.

This isn't to say we can't learn from others. You can study someone's path. You can adopt their methods. But you can't look at other people to decide who you are. The would-be runner didn't think running is an effective way to get healthy. They thought I want to be someone like that. The first borrows a method. The second borrows a self.

Underneath borrowed goals, there's often something real. Maybe it's not running, but there's a genuine desire to be healthier, to have more energy, to not die early. That desire is actually theirs. The marathon was just a borrowed answer to it.

The uncomfortable work is seeing that clearly. What do you actually want? Not what looks impressive. Not what earned someone else applause. What's yours? Once you see it, there are many actions that follow more naturally than a 05:30 run you hate. You don't have to force alignment. You just have to stop pretending you're someone you're not.

Exit Two: When who you are becomes unacceptable

The second exit is harder. Sometimes your current identity genuinely isn't compatible with what you want from life. The comfort-seeker identity might be incompatible with the future you actually want.

You cannot will yourself into a different identity. But you can reach a point where your current identity becomes intolerable. Through disgust, the old identity dies. When this person gets up to run, they smile at the pain and the suffering because it's killing an identity they hate.

The marathon runner never got there. The couch was still comfortable and the validation was enough. Nothing about who they were had become unacceptable to them. So the identity persisted, and the goals that threatened it kept failing.

The question that unlocks this exit is: What would have to become unacceptable about who you currently are for this goal to feel inevitable?

If nothing needs to become unacceptable, if you're fine staying exactly who you are, the goal is a fugazi. And that's fine. But know which one you're choosing.

The alignment test

So before you announce the goal and before the monkey gets its validation, just stop for a minute.

Run your goal through these questions. They're not a checklist for picking better goals. Rather, they're a filter that reveals whether a goal is actually yours, or exposes borrowed ambition before you waste a year on it.

Whose goal is this, actually? Your subconscious won't fully engage with goals you've borrowed from others. "I should do X because successful people do X" is not your goal. It's theirs. The would-be runner's marathon was borrowed. They wanted to be seen as a runner, not to actually run.

What happens after you achieve it? Think second-order. Many stupid goals only reveal themselves post-achievement. The would-be runner, if they'd finished, would have faced a choice: keep running (which they hate) or stop and lose the validation they'd built. There was no good outcome because the goal was never real.

Is it singular or scattered? Multiple simultaneous targets fragment your focus. "Get fit, build a business, learn Spanish, read 50 books" is pursuing nothing. It's also a tell. People scatter goals when they're not willing to commit to one, because commitment means potential failure at something specific.

Can you vividly describe the achieved end-state? Abstract goals don't give your subconscious a target. "Be successful" or "live meaningfully" are too vague for your brain to pursue. The runner could describe crossing the finish line. Could they describe wanting to run the Tuesday after? The year after? No, because that life was never compatible with their identity.

Can you tolerate being publicly terrible at this? This is the real test. If the answer is "only if I progress quickly" or "only if no one sees," you're chasing validation, not pursuing something real. The would-be runner couldn't tolerate being a slow, struggling, unglamorous jogger in public. They needed to either be impressive or have an excuse.

What would have to become unacceptable about who you currently are? If nothing needs to become unacceptable, if you're fine staying exactly who you are, the goal is performative.

If the runner had sat with that last question and found "nothing, I'm actually fine", then fine. Stop pretending to want transformation. Enjoy the couch. There's no shame in knowing who you are.

But if the answer was "actually, this comfort is slowly killing something in me", then they've found the real starting point. Genuine dissatisfaction with the present. That's where change begins.

The Uncomfortable Work

Remember, your capacity for execution isn't the constraint. Your willingness to see yourself clearly—and either find goals that fit who you are, or become genuinely unable to tolerate who you are—is the entire game.

Hollow achievement is worse than no achievement. It's better to spend January, even February and beyond, honestly asking what's actually yours than spending a year brilliantly achieving the wrong things. Successfully completing a borrowed purpose doesn't feel good for long. You'll know, even if no one else does.

This introspection feels paralytic compared to the productive feeling of executing. That's why it's avoided. Don't avoid it.

The uncomfortable work is seeing yourself clearly. Action follows naturally from there.

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Thanks to Mignon Duminy for reading drafts of this.

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