The Goal That's Been Waiting for You to Take It Seriously

What we get wrong about goal-setting — and what it can actually do for us.

Most of us have a complicated relationship with goal-setting. We've done the January resolutions that fizzled by February. We've made the vision boards, filled the journals, downloaded the apps. And somewhere along the way, many of us quietly concluded that we're just not "goal people" — that the whole apparatus is better suited to a certain type of driven, optimized, color-coded personality that we are not.

I want to push back on that. Not because goal-setting is for everyone in the same way, but because I think we've been sold a version of it that was never really about us to begin with.

The goals we're most often encouraged to set — the ones about productivity and output and becoming a better, leaner, more efficient version of ourselves — are products of the same culture that profits when we feel insufficient. They're designed to keep us reaching for a moving target. No wonder they leave us cold.

"The most powerful goals aren't the ones that make us more impressive. They're the ones that make us more ourselves."

What I've seen, in years of working with people around health and habit change, is that the goals that actually stick are the ones that connect to something real — a quiet desire, a value someone holds deeply, something they've been meaning to return to. Not a "should." A want.

There's something almost radical about taking your own wants seriously. We're socialized — women and trans and non-binary people especially — to be fluent in other people's needs and vaguer about our own. To know immediately what everyone in the room requires and to treat our personal desires as a secondary agenda item, the thing we'll get to later, when there's time.

But a genuine goal — one you chose because it actually matters to you — asks you to do the opposite. It asks you to say: this thing I care about is worth my time and attention. It is worth me showing up for consistently. It is worth treating as real.

Before the pandemic I saw the drum band, Fogo Azul, march by me in the Brooklyn Pride Parade. I thought - I need to do that! I joined as a newbie that spring and drummed with the band for a few years until I had to take a break for health reasons. It was one of the most incredible things I've done in the past ten years.

I once watched a teacher change his life because of a bulletin board. He was a smoker, had been for years. His wife wanted him to stop. His kids needed him to. He had every reason. But the thing that finally moved him was seeing my students' goal-setting updates displayed in the hallway — the small, earnest, varied things they were each trying to do. Something about watching other people take their own change seriously made him take his seriously too.

That's the part about goal-setting that rarely gets talked about: it isn't just personal. When you commit to something that matters to you, it radiates. It changes what you model, what you bring into your relationships, how you move through the world. The most individual act of self-investment turns out to be quietly communal.

"Having a goal you're actually working toward is one of the most human things there is. It connects you to your own desires — and through them, to everyone else who has ever wanted something and decided to try."

So if you've been carrying around something you keep meaning to do — a practice you want to build, a commitment you want to honor, a version of your life you keep sketching and setting aside — I'm not here to tell you to hustle harder or optimize better.

I'm here to say: that thing is data. It's pointing somewhere. And the act of taking it seriously — of treating it like it counts — might be more meaningful than you think. Not just for you, but for everyone in your orbit watching you do it.

What's the goal that's been waiting? Not the responsible one, not the impressive one. The one that's quietly, persistently yours.