Why We Don't Accomplish Our Goals

A whole industry exists to help you accomplish your goals. Thousands of books, websites, and seminars offer you strategies and tactics to define smart goals and knock them out of the park. Yet days and years go by and you keep kicking the can down the road.

What is often overlooked by these resources is that there is some fundamental disconnect between  our long-term goals and our short-term desires:

I want to lose weight.
I want to eat this box of Girl Scout cookies.

I want to be a high performer at my job.
I don't feel like doing this task right now.

I want to learn to program.
I'm too tired to do this code tutorial.

I want to work for myself someday.
I'd rather relax and browse the internet than identify business opportunities.

I want to take up backcountry skiing.
My legs are tired, I'll just ride the lifts today.

Ever since I was born weighing 11lb I have been overweight. All the way through highschool, being heavy was not only acceptable, but necessary to my role as a lineman on the football team. Losing weight was something I would get to when I got to it. As college came and went, and the first year or two in a new career wore on, I was half-heartedly pursuing weightloss. Which is to say, I was feeling guilty about how I should be losing weight but not doing much about it. My short-term desires for fried southern food and my wife's prolific baking were winning out against my long-term goal of being a healthy weight.

Then, about a year ago, something changed. I made a decision to lose weight now, not put it off for later. I don't know exactly what it was, other than that it was a sudden, dramatic realignment of my short-term desires with my long-term goals. Like a fault line releasing tension, the guilt from conflicting goals vanished as I decided to make each eating decision in-line with my weightloss goal. This isn't the first time this has happened for me; on a handful of occasions throughout my life I have had lightswitch events like this. Maybe I'm just weird this way, but I don't think so. I think its probably related to the "rock-bottom" that is supposed to be so important for addicts to realize the need for change.

Any self-help website can tell you how to set good goals and ways of tricking yourself into working toward them for awhile. That much is trivial. But I'm interested in figuring out where the heck these seismic shifts come from, and whether circumstances can be arranged to induce them. We spend most of our energy fighting ourselves, fighting that battle between what we want right now and what we want for ourselves down the road. There is potential energy here wound-up like a spring, ready to be released back into our work and our passions if only we could find that trigger.