86. On goals and ambitions

Greetings, friends. We’re into the last few hours of the first month of 2025, and I’d like to do a bit of stock-taking. Taking stock? I just experienced semantic satiation writing this paragraph, which I was only able to break by investigating the etymology of the idiom “take stock”. Reddit says it was attested in English in 1736 with the denotation of “compiling an inventory of dry goods”. So there you go.

At the end of December, Besha and I used the long hours on the road to Joshua Tree, and the blessed respite of a few days holiday in the desert to formulate some goals for the new year.

One of the few broadly applicable ideas I acquired in my interminable years in Silicon Valley was the notion that no goal is truly a goal unless it is “SMART”: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. If it isn’t something concrete that you are likely to be able to complete definitively within a specifiable timeframe, it’s not a real goal.

Let us be charitable and call this sort of non-goal an ambition. It’s a thing you want to do, sure, but the means and/or plan is nebulous or lacking.

I submit that most New Year’s resolutions come in the form of ambitions. I want to go to the gym, I want to lose weight, I want to learn Spanish, I want to donate to charity. Cool. When? How often? How much? What exact steps are you taking? How will you know when you’ve succeeded?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t turn my nose up at ambitions, and I definitely am not judging anyone for making resolutions that aren’t SMART.

But I look at my own behavior over nearly half a century, and I see a recurring pattern of my ambitions coming to nothing, or nothing much, when I formulated them on the back of earnest good intentions and not much else. Which was most of the time. Earnest good intentions might be sufficient motivation for people who were born disciplined, or else acquired that force of character through the friction of life… but I am neither of those people.

The result of having labored under intermittent but chronic executive dysfunction for pretty much my entire life is that I gradually developed a basic lack of trust in my own ability to do anything that didn’t either offer an immediate dopamine reward, or have some kind of structure imposed upon it from without. Why trust someone who never keeps their promises?

No longer feeling obliged to work at a senseless job that wasn’t aligned with my values opened up a little space in my life to figure out what it was I might actually do when I finally grow up. Getting some help last month with that executive dysfunction, in the form of an ADHD diagnosis and some medical intervention, helped open up a little more space.

How did I want to spend my time in the coming year? What kinds of outcomes would leave me feeling next December that I had made good use of 2025?

Now I have another post teed up in my head about identifying and writing down my personal values, which I had meant to write down as a prelude to talking about the goals I chose… but the end of the month is upon us. It is time to take stock.

These are my goals for 2025: …

Don’t laugh, but as soon as I typed that, I paused to search Google for “discussing plans socially to raise likelihood of accomplishing them” while looking for exactly the right way to say social accountability and what I got instead was a page full of results with titles like:

• “Why telling people your goals is a fatal mistake”

• “Talking About Your Goals With Peers Reduces the…”

• “Research Reveals That Publicly Announcing Your Goals Makes You Less Likely to Achieve Them”

• and the one article I actually did read, “The science-backed reasons you shouldn’t share your goals”, which was published on the Atlassian blog.

Now, if there’s anyone in the whole world who knows all about evaporating motivation through the process of communicating goals… it’s Atlassian. They are the experts.

Whoops. So maybe I won’t talk about my goals for 2025; instead, I guess I’ll do them, or not. Maybe in December I’ll talk about what they were meant to be, and you can take my word for it, or not.

My point is that I wrote down four goals for myself, and made sure that each one was specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. I didn’t want to go overboard, but three wasn’t enough. So four it is.

Reviewing those goals after a month, I see that have not reached a meaningful milestone on any of them yet. Hm.

But I will say that even simply doing this reflection has brought me much, much closer to my framed goals for the year than anything else I have ever done in the past. How often does a New Year’s ambition survive January?

Anyway, the truth is that I haven’t eschewed ambitions completely in favor of goals. I still have the ambition of learning Spanish, which I study most days on Duolingo. The ambition is neither specific nor time-bound. But they gamified the activity and now I do it (almost) every day, just to keep the streak going.

I also set the ambition of writing 200,000 words in 2025, because I was fairly certain that, if I could accomplish that ambition, it would virtually guarantee success for two of my four goals.

So the real reason I’m writing this post today is that January is over, and, to keep on pace, I have to write a bit shy of 17,000 words per month. I am including all documents I write for work, and any kind of writing I do (outside of direct communication) for my own purposes. I am not nit-picking too much about what is a countable word. But I am keeping a log of the things I write, to try to keep myself motivated.

If I count this entire entry, I come in at 18,579 words for the month of January. So far, so good.

I didn’t promise myself to write 200,000 words this year, and I won’t give myself a hard time if I don’t. It’s just an ambition. The real goals are yet to come.

If you’re still reading this, I wish you a happy February! Ceterum censeo vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. If you set personal goals, or thought about setting goals, for 2025, and you want to tell me about them, I am all ears. If you think it’ll help. But maybe it won’t?