In Praise of the Boring Goals

There’s a kind of goal that the internet is obsessed with.

This kind of goal involves 5:00 a.m. alarms, cold plunges, fancy color-coded Excel sheets, and year-in-review threads with 47 screenshots. This kind of goal is photographed against a window with perfect light and launches a podcast.

Then there’s the other kind, the kind nobody posts about, the kind you don’t see unless you really look.

Get to bed by eleven.

Walk after lunch.

Call mom on Sunday.

Sit down on Friday and look at the week.

These are the goals that legitimately run a life. And almost nobody writes them down, because written down they look small. They look like the kind of thing you shouldn’t need a system for. They look like things you should already be doing.

Here’s the secret: this is the kind of goal that matters most and is hardest to keep.

The fireworks goal vs. the moat goal

A firework goal is bright, brief, and made for an audience. Something like launch a company, run a marathon, write a book in 30 days. These kinds of goals are not bad, but they share a flaw. They end. The firework goal is by definition something that is completed and then you are no longer doing.

A moat goal is something that defends your life from slowly deteriorating. Sleep is a moat goal. Walking is a moat goal. Weekly review is a moat goal. These are some of the things that can have the biggest difference on whether or not you feel happy in your life.

Most goals don’t go viral. Nobody screenshots their bedtime. No one names a podcast, “I Took a Walk Today.” You can keep a goal like this for a decade with nothing to show for it. Except for, and this is the key, the kind of life that doesn’t quietly fall apart.

Why the boring ones compound

A firework goal compounds linearly. Once you do the thing, it’s over. You have the thing. That’s it.

A boring goal compounds exponentially because it’s really protecting your capacity to deliver everything else. Sleep is not a goal about sleep. Sleep is a goal about every decision you’ll make tomorrow being slightly less stupid, slightly less tired. The Friday review is not a goal about reviewing. It’s a goal about not waking up in six months wondering how you ended up here.

The reason this is really hard to see is that the upside of a moat goal is often invisible. It’s the bad thing that didn’t happen, the argument you didn’t have, the opportunity you didn’t miss, the version of yourself you didn’t become.

You can’t put “Did not solely drift into burnout” on a resume, but it is, in fact, the achievement.

What to actually do

A few suggestions, in the spirit of the boring:

Write down one goal per area of your life. Just one. Physical, social, intellectual, and spiritual.
Make them embarrassingly small. “Walk after lunch” beats “exercise consistently.” Specificity is what survives a hard week. When you’re vague, then it dies on a Tuesday.
Track them weekly, not daily. Daily tracking can often turn a moat goal into a guilt machine. When you weekly track, then that turns it into a pattern you can see without burnout.
Protect them from your ambitious goals. When the fireworks goal and the moat goal conflict, the moat goal will win, always. And that’s the whole point. A firework goal is replaceable. A moat goal is not.
Don’t tell anyone. Seriously. The moment a boring goal becomes a thing you talk about, it starts trying to be a firework goal. Let it stay boring, boring is the moat.

The year that doesn’t post

The honest version of a good year is mostly nothing. It is mostly Tuesdays. It is mostly the walk you took, and the email you didn’t send, and the eleven o’clock bedtime you held against a Netflix episode you wanted to finish.

The honest version of Goodyear is mostly nothing. It’s mostly Tuesdays. It is mostly the walk you took and the email you didn’t send and the 11 o’clock bedtime that you held even with the Netflix episode you wanted to finish.

The fireworks year photographs better. The boring year wears better.

Pick the boring one. Almost nobody does, which is exactly why it works.