SOLVED with Mark Manson - How to Know When to Give Up on Goals

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

A lot of people treat goals like some kind of sacred self-improvement law, where the most important thing you can do is set and achieve your goals. But goals are simply tools we use to point us in the right direction. Your goals should serve you—and so you shouldn’t be a slave to some arbitrary goal you set when it’s no longer serving you. So how do you know when a goal is no longer pushing you in the right direction? In this episode, I talk about why I gave up a pretty big goal I set at the beginning of the year. I discuss what I think are the criteria you should use when deciding whether to give up on a goal or stick it out. We also discuss what we learned from the goals survey we did for podcast viewers and listeners. How many stuck with their goals and how many have moved on? What are the most effective tactics people used to stick to their goals? What are the most important lessons they learned about their goals and themselves? Check it out. Get your first month of Shopify for $1 at shopify.com/idgaf Get 10% off your first order of Mitopure from Timeline at timeline.com/idgaf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose. That is purpose. That is purpose.com. The podcast that's saving the world, one fewer fuck at a time. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. So as listeners and viewers probably remember, we started the year.

you and I talked about our goals for the year, and then we asked the podcast audience to submit their goals for the year, and we promised that halfway through the year we were going to follow up ourselves and follow up with the audience to determine how disciplined is the Mark Manson audience or how bad are we fucking up.

And so this is what we're here to discover today. We've sent out the survey. We've heard from the audience. Drew and I have our goals. We know how far we've gotten with our goals or haven't gotten with our goals. And so today's podcast episode is it's a return to goals and a discussion of when does it make sense to give up a goal,

because there are many circumstances that it makes sense to give up a goal, and when you should just shut the fuck up and grit through it. And we're going to try to figure that out today. So I don't know, where should we start? Let's start with our goals. Okay. And then we can move on to responses that we got from everybody. We got some good responses.

We got a big response from the audience. So let's start with ours, then we'll get into that. Okay, should I go first? Let's hear yours. What happened with the marathon? Let's start with the failure. Let's kick this off. It's going to make me look a lot better.

Let's kick this off with an abject failure. What happened? Okay, so to refresh everybody or anybody who didn't listen to that episode, my goal for the year was to run a marathon. I turned 40 this year. I really got in the running last year. I was like, you know what? You know, it's a great 40-year-old goal?

Like, there was a marathon on my birthday. I was like, this is perfect. Let's do a marathon. So I started training for a marathon actually in November, and then we did that podcast end of last year, came out first week of January, made it very public that I was going to go on a marathon. And actually, the only marathon I ran on my birthday was a marathon of tacos in Mexico. There's no way around it. I didn't achieve the goal. I gave it up probably early February, late January, early February, maybe five weeks out. Oh, was it that early? Okay.

Yeah, it was maybe five weeks out. Yeah. But I feel good about giving it up. So I want to use myself is a case study of an audience i mean drew keep me honest if it sounds like i'm bullshitting myself please tell me because this is the tricky thing about giving up goals is like you sound reasonable to yourself like we all we all find reasons to justify not sticking with them but you know sometimes we're full shit and sometimes we are being reasonable i personally think i'm being reasonable so here's what happened there are two things that i discovered so initially i started training for the marathon really enjoyed it, was going very, very well. Once I worked up to around 10 to 12 miles, two things happened. One is started really disliking it, just a lot of pain, which I've since learned

from other, like from people who have done a lot of endurance sports that that probably stemmed from training too quickly, like pushing myself too quickly, which is something that we talked about back in January of like having unrealistic expectations of what is achievable in a certain amount of time. So you could chalk up, that could be part of the failure is that I overestimated how much I was capable of achieving in just three or four months. So once I got into double-digit mileage, body started really hurt. Recovery became very difficult. Just felt like my energy was sapped all the time, started having trouble getting out of bed. Second thing that I didn't account for, I didn't realize, was the time commitment. Like you see these training regimens of like,

okay, you're going to run six miles on Tuesday and four miles on Wednesday and three miles on Friday and then 12 miles on Saturday. Like you look at that and you're like, okay, well, that's a cool challenge. Well, you don't realize that's like six hours of running. And then when you add in prep, warm up, stretching, recovery, everything afterwards, like you're dedicating like 10 to 15 hours a week just to training. And we're in a place in the business. Like we're great. We're rowing, we're scaling, I'm working a lot. I have a lot of business-related goals that are higher priority. And so being off in the mountains running for 12 hours a week and then being exhausted like another 30 to 40 hours a week, I just started realizing that it was incompatible with other

goals in my life, with a lot of the professional goals and career goals that I have this year. And it kind of forced me into a situation of like, does this even make sense? I'm exhausting myself doing something I don't enjoy and actively harming things that are more important to me, you know, is like running this arbitrary distance really that important? Like, is it making my life better? Is it making me happier? I came to the conclusion, no, it's not. That there are plenty of ways that I can maintain my health and in getting great shape that don't involve suffering a dozen hours a week and interfering with all sorts of like work goals and life goals. And not to mention like spending free time with my wife. So I dropped it. And I felt good about it. And I still

feel good about it. I have zero regrets about it. Tell me, am I full shit? No, that actually doesn't sound like you're bullshitting yourself or anybody else. It doesn't. Because I think you're being intentional about like, okay, I thought this thing was the most important thing at this time in my life. And it turns out it wasn't. I mean, I think that's a very, that's kind of one of the criteria you should use. Is it really that important to you? And I think a lot of people when they get into these goals, and I think we'll talk about this later too, they find out they're like, oh, I didn't, this actually isn't that important to me. I thought it was.

Your health is very important to you. Yes. Right. But like this one, like you said, this one arbitrary goal of a distance run on a certain date, is really that important compared to all the other things that are going on in your life. I think you raise a good point there of like prioritization because there was a period a couple years ago. So when I was really overweight and much, much more unhealthy, there was a part of my fitness

journey that like I realized I had to make it the top priority in my life. One of the reasons I got so out of shape earlier in my life is because I always prioritized work and social life over health. And so I had a period for a couple years where I had to prioritize health over work and social life. There is a context where that makes sense. If I was, let's say I was like 60 pounds overweight, horribly out of shape, I mean, maybe not a marathon, but maybe making health this year the top priority.

Maybe that makes sense. But for where I am in my life, I'm pretty satisfied where I am health-wise. I don't feel like I need to. I have no desire to be like a David Goggins or a bodybuilder or anything like that. Like, I just want to be healthy. And actually the area of my life that I have extremely ambitious goals is not health. It's actually more work related. So to me, it makes sense to keep that as the top priority at this point in my life.

So I still have fitness goals. I have new fitness goals. We'll talk about them later. I think they're more reasonable fitness goals. They're probably more appropriate fitness goals. But I think this is the thing that. gets missed. I think there's way too much emphasis put on what is the goal and did you achieve it or not. I think those two things like it's it's actually less important than what the process teaches you. So like setting

the marathon goal, it taught me a lot about what matters to me, what is actually important at this point in my life. And by letting it go, I was able to replace it with actually a better goal for me. A goal that makes more sense for my current lifestyle, it makes more sense for my current fitness goals, and it's basically just going to make me a happier and healthier person overall. So ultimately, it's like the goals should be used as tools to advance you towards behaviors that are closer to your values. And what people lose track of is that if you set the wrong goal or the goal isn't completely accurate, then it can lead you down a path of behavior that actually takes you away from

what you value in your life. And as soon, so you have to be like very, very observant of when that starts happening and then stop yourself and be like, okay, this is a bad goal. I should drop it and replace it with something else. So I'm curious, your goal was to sleep better this year. I'm curious, A, what sort of progress you've made. And B, have you, did you decide that that was a waste of time and have you replaced it with a more important goal like bench pressing 300 pounds or something? Well, yeah, no. The thing is about sleep is that it's not, it's not, it's not.

really a goal I can ignore. It's never going to go away. So I mean, yeah, I could give up on like trying to get better at it, but it's like it's just never going to go away. So it's constantly there with me. So I have gotten better. I've had it's fits and starts. Okay. The thing is is that now that I've been more, I've paid more attention to it and I know kind of like what makes me get better or worse sleep. And I've had stints where I've had really good sleep over the last few months. I'm even more aware of when I don't get good sleep. And it's worse. when I don't get into sleep. So let's start with specifically, what have you done?

What are the measures that you've taken? I did cut back on my caffeine. A lot of people were very concerned. My caffeine intake, because it was brutal. Like I said, five or six cups, I think is what I usually drink. I've now capped it at three cups a day. I usually only do two, but a hard cap at three. Okay.

I think the caffeine, that didn't help a whole lot. I think if that's going to help, I need to just cut it out completely. Yeah. Which I'm not quite there yet. The screens, especially later at night, I had a very strong suspicion that that was a big impediment to my sleep and turns out it was. I've capped that at 10 p.m. I tried to do 9 p.m.

and didn't really see much of a difference, I don't think. So 10 p.m., no screens after that. That seems to help quite a bit. If I have screens open later than that, it definitely fucks with my sleep. Interesting, okay. I've gotten way better at regular exercise as well. Surprisingly, that doesn't seem to matter for my sleep.

Really? Yeah, whether I get a good workout, a bad workout, any workout, no workout, it doesn't really seem to affect my sleep. You know what's funny? And I've noticed this with fitness. goals over to last year. Sometimes if a workout's particularly like really intense or strenuous, I actually get worsely. Yeah. Later in the day too, if I do it later in the day, like an intense workout later in day. A light workout later in day is fine. But yeah. I've also kind of, I did some tracking too. I've never been huge on tracking. But with, you know, your stories about your tracking and

how it's helped you and a lot of other people too. I did some kind of just basic tracking, not super detailed or anything like that. That's helped a little bit too. And I can see. that I have incrementally gotten better. Like, I plotted my sleep time, actually, on a graph and stuff like that. And there's a slight upslope on how much sleep I've been doing. Okay. What was your kind of average per night at the beginning of the year? And then what roughly where is it at now?

Yeah. So the way I tracked, it's a proxy. It's not a... Is it like a score? Yeah, basically a score. So what were like, what score were you kind of at when you started? So I was usually getting in like the 60 to 70 out of 100 range before. And now I'm like consistently in the 70s hitting in the 80s.

Nice. Okay. Yeah, it's incrementally better. Really what I would like to get is like 90 and above. Yeah. And kind of consistently get there, you know, at least like five nights out a week or whatever. For that, I think I'm going to have to do some more drastic things. One thing I started experimenting with, too, was like the light exposure, early morning stuff,

and then getting a little bit at night. That was sporadic. I think for the rest of the year I'd really like to get into that and really even do like a sunlight protocol of some kind or something like that. I think that would help me quite a bit because I did notice that that, it helps at least reset my clock. If I get some good morning sunlight, I've got good energy for the rest of the day. Yeah. So I think that I'm pretty sensitive to that. And I think that's why screens fuck me have so much too. Where have your struggles been? Like where have you fucked up? Screen time sometimes. I'd like to just veg out at night. Yeah. Like throw a screen in front of my face and watch it on TV.

I watched all of Rick and Morty. Oh, so good. It's like I binge through that. And a lot of times I'm doing it late at night. I was like, okay, I got to shut this out. And that's another thing. It's just we know what we need to do. We don't do it. even with these goals. And I don't know what that's about still. I don't know what that is for me just yet. I had a friend who was like completely addicted to his phone, social media, everything, especially at night.

Yeah. And it was causing a lot of problems. And he did something crazy, which I really admire, which is, so you can buy these plugs that have a timer on them. Yeah. And you like preset like when they turn on and off. He put those plugs all around the house and then he set a password on them that he didn't have access to.

I think he gave it to his wife or something. But he basically, the router that was. was plugged into the that the Wi-Fi went through was set up with one of these plugs and the plug shut off at 9 p.m. So it's all the internet and the house went off at 9 p.m. Right. All the TVs went off at 9 p.m. And there's like no way for him to unless he like goes and like crawls under the console and like unplugs everything and replugs it in. It's basically like child protecting yourself. I do think stuff like that is underrated. I used to hear that stuff. And I'm like that's ridiculous. Right. Like that's so over the top. But it is funny. Like we really are creatures. of our environment and so much of our behavior is influenced by incentive and availability. And yeah, if you just control the availability of something. Environment matters. It matters at a time. Yeah, it's huge.

What I noticed though, too, is that the environment and also like external pressures for whatever reason, they work really well for me. Yeah. So like just doing this podcast, I'm like setting that up, setting that up for me that puts the pressure on me that I need. I think everybody's kind of different around that, but there's so much around like, oh, like, you should only be doing your goals for intrinsic Y values, right? And like, you're doing stuff like that.

I'm like, ah, you should set up your environment and like make there be external consequences. Sure. I mean, social pressure is a real thing and it's never going to go away and you might as well leverage it for your advantage. Like you're never going to stop caring what people think. Yeah. And so if you go tell all your friends, you know, hey, I'm going to quit smoking. And then a week later, you light up a cigarette in front of them.

That's embarrassing, right? So, like, you should be conscious of how you're using that to your advantage. It's the family and friends event at Shoppers Drug Mart. Get 20% off almost all regular priced merchandise. Two days only. Tuesday, April 28th and Wednesday, April 29th. Open your PC optimum app to get your coupon. What else?

What else are you, any plans going forward or? I realized I need to get a little bit more specific. I was just like, get better sleep. Right. How do you measure that? Yeah. And so I realize that through the tracking. I'm like, oh, I don't know. And a lot of people reported that tracking has been the most beneficial thing for them and valuable thing for me. It's a classic business principle, right? Like you improve what you measure. So yeah, I think getting more specific. And like I said, get my scores. If I can get those more in the 80s and 90s more consistently, I think that's a good, that's a good, that's a good goal that I can see in front of my face. That would help me a lot of things. And you were saying that now that you do, you have experienced some good nights of sleep when you don't get one, you're just like. Fuck me. It's like I see the extremes now and I see like man, if I don't get a minimum of six hours.

Yeah. I am just useless. And it's this vicious cycle too where it's like I got something I got a lot to do tomorrow and stuff like that. And I start getting in my own head and I don't sleep well. And then all that stuff I need to do. Now I'm doing it very shittily, you know, or something like that. Snowballs. Yeah.

Sometimes I think part of it's getting older. But yeah, if I don't get six hours, I mean, I might as well just like call the day off. I might as well just call and sick. Seriously. Because it's, even if I do brute force my way through the day, I'm going to do such a poor job at everything. It's kind of like, it's like, what's the point? All right. So let's get into the survey stuff.

We asked you guys to send us your goals at the beginning of the year. We had 14, was it 1,400 people sent in their goals? Almost 1,400, yeah. 1,400 people sent in their goals. Then we sent out a survey last week asking people to report on how they've been doing. Here are the results. Drum roll. Yeah, well, if we start off with,

The goals you all did submit. Again, about 1,400 people submitted something, and we had you write out, you know, what's your goal and everything like that? And I kind of just did a brief summary of them. They're around a lot of the things you would expect. A lot of them like career and professional development, people, you know, either trying to get a raise or get a new job. What was the most common one? Most common was fitness and health.

Okay. Losing weight or running a marathon or, you know, stuff like that. Most common was around that. Next one was like career stuff. Yeah. Kind of getting financial stuff in orders to that was a common. saving money, getting a raise. Yeah, yeah.

So a lot of the common ones, which is not surprising, but also, like, yeah, that's what you would expect because people kind of all want the same things. But yeah, so things like changing careers, starting a side hustle, that was really common, or just, like, improving skills. Like a lot of people wanted to teach themselves into coding language or a design program or something like that.

Mental health was a big one, though, too. Interesting. People, you know, they're like, I need to do some things to really improve my mental health here, whether that was just, like, taking more time to themselves or taking more time off work. or self-care stuff, that kind of stuff.

Learning education, too. We got a very learning hungry crowd, which doesn't surprise me at all. Some people were doing some kind of cool stuff. One guy was he wanted to learn machine learning and AI by taking NVIDIAs. Oh, cool. They had this, like, course that he wanted to take.

And I was like, that's a pretty cool thing to do. Yeah. But then, like, cool personal projects, too. It always surprises me, like, the audience we have. You guys are always working on cool, really cool stuff. Like, somebody was working on a graphic novel, which is really cool, writing a book on their philosophical theory,

developing a sports trading app. There was just really cool stuff. People were like, you're aiming high. Nice. And that's awesome. In terms of results, about 80% of people say they have stuck with their goals, which is pretty good.

Really good. 20% say now I've given up on that. What are the exact numbers on that? Exact numbers. So 78.1%. Okay. So they stuck with it. Yeah.

How many people responded to this survey? About 300. 300. Okay. Teaching moment. Okay. Teaching moment. All right, this is actually really good.

I'm glad. Statistics lesson. What are we doing? I'm glad this happened because, well, this is important because, and I think this is important for the audience to hear because there's a lot of podcasts out there, a lot of journalists out there that you will see things like headline, you know, new study finds that 80% of people stick to their goals in June, you know, and it's everybody's like, oh my God, that's so much higher than I would have expected, blah, blah, blah.

And guys, I cannot tell you how many times if you actually. actually go look at the survey data, there's some things that stand, if you know what to look for, a few things stand out. So we mentioned just a few minutes ago, 1,400 people responded in January with their goals. We sent out a survey last week, 300 people responded. That's 20, 25% of the original people. So that's actually, most people didn't respond to our survey. Now, if you did not stick with your goal, do you think you're more likely or less likely to respond to the survey. If you did stick to your goal, do you think you're more likely or less likely? So it's like what we're probably doing is like most of the people who stuck through the goal probably responded,

I would guess. We don't know for sure. But my guess is that there's going to be, this is what's called selection bias in research. And this is why a lot of survey research is flawed is because it's the way the survey is constructed. It filters who's going to actually respond to the survey, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In this case, it was unintentional because we asked everybody. but there's probably a lot of people out there who didn't stick with their goal they feel kind of bad about it and they definitely don't want to tell us

so they don't fill it out whereas there's probably a lot of people who did stick with their goal and they're feeling really good about it and they're like oh I can't wait to tell Mark and Drew about sticking it to my goal so this 80% or the 78% or whatever it's probably very skewed and there's definitely a selection bias flaw

in this survey so I want to just put that in front of the audience the next time you see a big headline saying survey says or research says that, you know, social media makes everybody miserable. It's like, okay, well, go look at the sample size, look at how they ran the survey. And I'd say at least 50% of the time, there are fundamental issues with the survey itself. 100%. Yeah, this is not scientific. No, no, no. And it's, but it's, I like to bring this up as frequently, because this is a huge problem in our industry.

There are a huge problem. There's a lot of podcasts out there that will pay. Like there are a lot of podcasts out there that would get this result and be like 80% of our audience sticks with their goals like check out the Mark Manson podcast. His audience is crushing it, right? And it's like, no, not really. It's not a representative sample. It's got extreme selection bias. There's probably issues you could find with phrasing of questions and stuff. So I just want to put that out there. I think it's really important to point that out. It's a huge problem in the industry. I know people who listen to this podcast, probably listen to a lot of other podcasts in the space or read. a lot of other people in the space. There are some people in the space who are very aware of these sorts of things and they know how to filter for them. There are a lot of people in the space

who don't know a fucking thing about this and will just repeat whatever statistic they find that sounds interesting. So be wary. Off my soapbox. For sure. I mean, it is a good point, though, because we tried to mitigate that a little bit too

because in the email we sent out asking for responses, you said, hey, I gave up on my goal, So it's okay if you did too. I just want to know. Yeah. Right. So we tried to mitigate that a little bit, but obviously there's still, you know,

some shame attached to that for some people, I'm sure and whatever. It's also just a simple, like, it's less exciting to fill out a survey about a goal that you gave up three months ago. Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. And I totally get that. You know, that said, though, too, of the people who said they gave up on their goal,

60% said they didn't regret it. Yeah. So, you know. Which is also interesting because I imagine that's probably skewed as well. Yeah. Definitely. Like, I don't, it's, I don't regret it. I can't wait to tell them about how I don't regret it.

You know, there's probably a large number of people who gave up on it and feel bad about it that we're not hearing from, I would assume. Well, okay. That said, good job. We did. No, way to go, team, 80%. There was some good stuff in here. There was some good qualitative data. Let's hear, yeah, let's hear from the people who stuck with it first.

Yeah, so the people who stuck with it, we asked them like, what did you do? Like, do you use any of these tactics? We kind of give them a menu of tactics and what did you do to help you achieve this goal. About 55, 56% said productivity or other inspirational content, so they're watching YouTube videos or listen to the podcast like these or whatever. The next highest one that was tracking. Almost half the people said they use tracking. And some of the comments later we'll discuss.

That was a big one like I mentioned earlier. Journaling, about 35% of people use journaling to 25% use accountability partners. Nice. 15% were using coaching of some kind, which is kind of cool. And then one interesting one I found about 18% of people said that this is the whole of the whole survey, this is everybody, said that they didn't use any, any sort of tactic or anything like that. Wow. So just brute force.

Just brute force. One guy said pure fucking determination. That was his other. Good old willpower. I found it kind of interesting to, again, this is not scientific and it's biased data. But about 20% of the people who gave up on their goal said they didn't use anything, while only about 10% of people who stuck with it so they didn't use anything.

So people who were using some sort of system of some kind seemed to do a little bit better. Clearly helped. Yeah. It helped them. Yeah. Which I found was pretty interesting. We had them to fill out, like, what was the most valuable thing you learned out of all this? And a lot of, again, the tracking people didn't realize how valuable. A lot of people were like, that actually helped me a lot.

Yeah. And that's just something simple. A checkbox every day or whatever it is. And for me, too, again, the tracking really helped me quite a bit. You already mentioned this a little bit you alluded to this, but the self-discovery that people experienced as a result of just setting the goal. And I think that's another underrated thing about goals that people don't, yeah, whether you achieve it or not, kind of doesn't matter. It's what you learn about yourself along the way. People repeatedly, people were like, this was definitely like an eye-opening self-discovery.

Absolutely. And I think that's one of the most, if not the most valuable things about setting goals. And it's funny because that discovery, it can go different. I've always had this weird fetish, I think, that a lot of people have for just like really grueling, challenging, painful things or deals. You know, it's like the guys who run, do Iron Man's and climb Everest and all this shit. Like, I've always had this kind of sick fascination with it and romanticized it to a certain extent. And my whole life, I've always kind of like fantasized of doing something like that,

accomplishing something like that. But it's one of those things that I discovered about myself that it's like when I'm actually outdoing it, it feels completely meaningless and purposeless. I'm like, what am I doing out here? Like, why am I here? But I know there's a lot of people that find a great amount of meaning and significance in it. But it's like that happens all throughout our life. Like it's, there's something, when we're on the outside of something, we look in and it seems very meaningful and like it's going to enrich our lives in a bunch of ways. And then we actually get in and start doing it. And you're like, oh, no, no, no. It's not, it's not the thing I thought it was.

You know, maybe I should find the next thing. And then sometimes it works the other way. Sometimes from the outside, something seems completely pointless and like, why would you ever do that? And then you go do it and you're like, oh, this is amazing. Right. I can't believe I waited so long to do this. Yeah, like you look at people who are like ultra runners or something like that. And it looked like me.

I look at how, why do you? Why? Yeah. And then you talk to these people and it's like, oh, they're all in on this. And there's like a life around it. You know, there's all sorts of things like that that function that way. And it's not just physical activities. It's creative activities.

One of the examples I use frequently is that I used to want to be a musician because my conception of what a musician was was getting to perform to audiences. And then once I actually got into it, what I realized is that 95% of your time as a musician is spent either practicing or dealing with like rehearsals and logistics and bullshit. So you need to love practicing and rehearsing. Those are the people that become musicians. It's the performance is just the cherry on top. Yeah. And then one other thing I'll mention too, which kind of stems from a lot of that, people often cited to the value of being flexible and adaptable. And I think you've you've talked about this a lot, but I don't know if you've ever

specifically addressed it, but, you know, life happens, right? There were some people who, like, they were doing, they had this workout goal and they got injured or, you know, a family emergency type of situation came up that they had to deal with over a longer period of time. And I think a lot of people just had an appreciation for like, I don't control nearly as much as I think I do. And that's okay. What are you talking about, Drew?

You fucking skip that funeral. You get that run in. Yeah, right, right? Exactly, like shit like that, right? Like, obviously you need to be adaptable. but I think people were just like, oh, life is still going on. The world's not stopping for my goals. It's funny because, I mean, I know I've said this many.

I said this on the last podcast too. I think the goals get oversold. Like the goal itself is not the point. The point is it gets you off your ass and doing something that teaches you something. That's what's meaningful. The goal itself is usually completely arbitrary. And I'd say nine times out of 10 isn't actually the thing that is rewarding. Occasionally it is.

Occasionally you do have a goal and it is actually the thing that makes you really happy and it is very rewarding. That does happen. But I think that's the, that's a minority of the time. That's the exception. The majority of the time, the goal is just kind of this arbitrary thing for you to aim at. And it just gets you off the couch, gets you out in the world, gets you working on yourself, learning, growing, doing different things. And it rarely works out the way you expect it to. Often my experience is that most goals, even when I hit them, it's a mixed bag. It's like, okay well that was worthwhile. Like when I was losing weight,

you know, I had a lot of weight loss goals. And as I hit them, there was never this like, oh my God, 30 pounds. Like it was always this mixed bag of like, okay, well, that was really hard. And I discovered that I have this kind of fucked up relationship with food. And I realized that my social life is probably contributing a lot to my health issues. So I'm going to have to reexamine my social life.

And it just became this very bittersweet thing of like, okay, Well, I hit the goal, but that actually seems like the least important thing that's going on right now because the path to get to the goal raised all these other issues and made me aware of all these other things happening in my life. That now I need to address those and think about those. There was quite a bit of that. And the response is people were like, I was going to try to get healthy, but actually I realized that I smoked too much weed or whatever it is or I need to quit smoking first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd say to one thing I've learned from this, I actually don't.

set a ton of goals and I realize this is another self-discovery thing I figured out. I don't set a ton of goals and it's because I'm a perfectionist and I'm just afraid of failure. Why set yourself up for failure? So so starkly like that, you know? What I found though through all of this is and listening to you talk about this has been more like it's it's fine. It's okay if you don't hit that goal. So for me that's just been like, okay, it's okay. You can change your goals. Yeah. Give them up. You can find new ones. You and I are opposite in that regard. And it's, I mean, I don't have to tell you.

How many goals have I set within the business over the last 10 years? Like, 100. Yeah. How many have I completely abandoned after like two months? 90% of that. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's, it's, they get you oriented in a certain direction. And, I mean, it's the same within business as well.

You know, like, oh, we're going to, we're going to drive revenue up 25% on this product line this year. And then you get three months in and you're like, oh, actually pushing revenue over here is like creating a bad tradeoff over here. And actually we should be focusing on this because that's a better long-term opportunity. Okay, well, fuck that goal. You know, and it's like that goal's basically gone. But you needed to have that goal to figure out that that trade-off was bad so you could reorient the strategy.

They're stepping stones. Right. They're stepping stones. And whether you actually hit the goal or not is far less important than what the process teaches you. I guess that's the moral of the story. For sure. Square knows that in hospitality, efficiency is everything.

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SUVW, German-engineered for all. Okay, so before we get into your updated goals, what we're going to do for the rest of the year, do you have kind of, can we sum that all up a little bit and just give people like maybe a couple of rules of thumb. Obviously, there's no real algorithm for when to give up on a goal or when to stick with it or anything like that. But do you have kind of, you mentioned a couple of them I think already. Can we kind of tie this up a little bit? So the principle is that your goal should be moving you towards your values.

And the moment that they stop, they start moving you away from your values, that's when it's time to give it up. And I think another time to give it up is when you realize that to achieve one goal, you actually need to go back. Like the smoking example is a great example. Like sometimes what you realize is to achieve one goal, you actually need to go back and set another goal first. You know, so that's another example of putting something on the back burner. Also, the realistic thing, like it is very hard, like we're human.

We suck at predicting the future. We suck at having a realistic sense of, you know, what's possible to accomplish in three months or six months or, or a year, we tend to overestimate or underestimate what is possible. And so the realism is part of it as well. It's like oftentimes you'll set a goal. It seems like a good goal. But it's actually, it's probably unrealistic.

Like even if I wasn't having the trade-off time at work to do the marathon goal, like let's say I had tons of free time and I had the time to just fucking spend every day of my life running, I probably could have powered my way through the marathon. But a couple of the people I know who do a lot of interesting. during stuff, they told me they're like, very good chance you would have gotten injured, just given the rate of that I was trying to push myself and lack of experience and everything. So even if that tradeoff hadn't existed, it might have been an unrealistic goal. But again, sometimes you don't know if it's unrealistic until you start. You know, sometimes you have to get a month in and be like, oh, this is fucking impossible. Let me change the goal now. Let me like move the goalpost back. and be a little bit more realistic about it. So I think those are three principles that people can kind of follow and gauge to to know when a goal is worth dropping.

Right. Yeah. I think there's some research on when goals do turn bad or toxic or whatever. And the findings are definitely in line with that. Yeah. A lot of times they've done this really at the organization level more than anything. Like organizational psychologists study this a lot. And one of the things they find is that when you set goals, and I think we're very aware of this

when we do this in the business anyway. When you set goals, it often incentivizes people for bad behavior of some kind. And this can happen on an individual level too. Like if you're like, I set a goal to make this much money, then you go out and start screwing people over or something like that, right? Well, you hit your goal making money, right? Right. It goes back to the values thing.

Yes. It's funny. I noticed I did a CrossFit workout last weekend for the first time in like three or four years. And I actually thought about this because. When I'm working out alone, like, let's say I'm doing an extra, I'm doing like squats, like three sets of 10 or something. When I'm by myself, I count every rep. Yeah.

You know, I'm like, I don't overestimate. Like, I don't fudge one. You know, it's like, did I hit 10? No, I got nine. Okay, right down nine. It was funny. I went to the CrossFit gym. And as you know, like a lot of CrossFit gyms, they put you in teams and they set time limits

and they give you like, you know, all right, you got to do 50 burpees and this amount of time and all this stuff. And so I started doing this workout. And I started fudging reps. Like I started, I'm like, you know, that kind of counted. I'm like, okay, well, I'm supposed to do 50. I'm at 40. That's close enough. You know, let's move on to the next one.

Like, I found myself, I'm like, start cheating. As you were saying that, like, because I've seen that research too, that that an over emphasis on goals actually makes people less ethical. Yeah. And it reminded me of that of like, I remember sitting there going through this workout at this CrossFit gym. I'm like, I have not cheated on reps like in five years, but suddenly I'm surrounded by all these other dudes who I'm like competing with and now I'm like okay I'm gonna fudge on this one you know

it's just funny it's human nature yeah I thought of another one another circumstance that you should give up a goal if you feel like you've already learned what what you wanted to learn this is more for probably like an educational goal but like sometimes people will like set a goal of like oh I want to get this certification this year or or I want to read 10 philosophy books this year or whatever and then you read five and you're like you know I kind of feel like I know I know everything I want to know I don't feel like I'm getting anything more out of book number six or seven, then just drop it. Like if you feel satisfied, you should never feel like you're just suffering to hit an arbitrary number. Anytime you feel like you're making yourself suffer to hit an arbitrary number that people just made up out of thin air, that's dumb.

You should stop. Like everything should have a purpose behind it. Every goal should have a purpose behind it. And as soon as that purpose disappears or is no longer clear or, is misaligned with what you actually care about, drop the goal. Nobody's keeping score. Nobody's going to judge you. Nobody cares. Yeah. I had a goal one year. It was to read a book a week. I think I made it almost three months in. And I quickly came to that. I was like, what? What am I doing? Yeah. And I was powering through books that I was like. Yeah. Only 100 pages left.

Yeah. And like the cheating on the reps thing, like do you give it up or do you keep going through? Yeah. It's like nobody's nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody's keeping score. There was like one person who was like, how are you even doing that? I sit down and I read. Yeah. Otherwise, nobody cared.

Nobody cared. Yeah, was all that suffering worth that one comment? Probably was not. No. Okay, cool. So you've given up on your hopes and dreams to run a marathon? For now. I mean,

I might do one one day. But so what I realize now is that it's much more of a two things. One is I would have to ramp into the train slower. Yeah. And two is it's more of a time commitment than I realized. Okay. And so for me, me to do it again, I would basically give myself more time to ramp up training and then I would

make sure that I don't have other stuff going on in my life that I prioritize higher. But you do have, you have new health goals. Yes. This is another reason I don't think you're completely bullshitting yourself is that you've set new goals in the same domain. Yes. Like, because you still prioritize your health. One of the problems I've had in the past is I'll set a goal and then I give up on it and

I'll set a completely different goal on a completely other area of my life just like bouncing around. really giving any thought to it, not being very intentional about it. So I think that you're not completely bullshitting us for it because you've still got, you still got, you do, pass the Drew Bernie test. Caviot that you pay me to say that. But, but still, what are your new health goals? So I should say slightly related to that. I do like to set domain specific. Like I feel like I should always have a health goal. I should always have a business or professional goal. And then I should always have like some sort of personal goal. So yeah, my new health goal, what I realized, I basically,

I've been on this four or five year health journey. Most of that involves weight loss. I'm pretty thin now, pretty skinny. I'd like to get stronger, especially like now that I'm 40. I've been doing a lot of reading on longevity, long-term health. Lifting's great. And it's basically, yeah, it's like build up as much muscle mass as you can while you still can because that's what's going to kind of carry you in the old age.

Helps with your skeleton a lot with your bones. Yeah. So I'm taking, I realize that, okay, probably the next step is to, to try to add some lean mass and get stronger. So I have goals in all three of the main major lifts, squat, deadlift, bench press. And so I'm working towards those this year. PRs in all three, hopefully this year.

I'm not going to, but I want to ask you what you bench, bro. I'm not very strong. I'm not very strong. I'm not very strong. I want to, they're pretty simple numbers. So I want to be able to deadlift 300 pounds for five reps, one set of five reps. squat 250 one set of five reps and then bench 200 one set of five reps and I'm like right now I'm probably like 260 to 15 220 and then like 175 180 okay cool so I'm like it's possible it's doable okay and what are you doing you're on a regular workout schedule and everything regular workout yeah regular workout I've up protein eating at a slight surplus so I've actually gained a little bit of weight but

last couple months. Travel has honestly been the biggest challenge with that. Traveling a lot for the YouTube channel. And yeah, that's the biggest challenge. So staying consistent with those workouts. It's funny because it used to be, I was always very consistent with exercise and my diet was terrible. Now it's kind of the other way around. Like my diet, I feel I can kind of keep my diet in line without too much trouble. But hitting three to four workouts a week consistently has been tough. Yeah, especially with your schedule. And again, the travel thing. Yeah, it wrecks everything. Yeah, it does. Everything. It does.

What about you? Well, yeah, so. How do we get you to sleep perfection? I really do. I want to do more of the light protocols, like some light protocols. Drive that out. And some of the things I've already mentioned just to kind of double down on those. I think I need to get a little bit better with the tracking too. I've been using kind of crude rough ways to do that. I don't like wearables, really, especially when I'm sleeping. so that makes it a little tougher. But now that I've seen the light and the value and the tracking,

I think I want to get a little bit more specific with that. Tracking is fucking. It's magic. It's game changing. Like the simplest stuff too, a checklist or whatever. It's so dumb. It's so dumb. It's so dumb.

But it makes such a difference. I'm really happy to see that people are seeing that across the board. Tracking is what changed my wife's sleeping. Yeah. It was the big unlock for her. And then with me with diet, it was probably the single. It and quitting alcohol were like the two biggest unlocks for me fixing my nutrition was tracking and not drinking. Right.

Yeah. So I think by the end of the year, if I can hit like those scores of like in the 80s or above, say four nights a week, I was thinking about that would be about so more than half the time. Okay. I think that's a good goal to start with. I think it's realistic and it's definitely achievable for me. But it would also be a little bit of work to get there. And is the biggest thing the screens? Is there something else you can do?

I think it's, I mean, short of ketamine. Maybe. Yeah, yeah, sort of just like sedating myself. The big one, I think my ultimate boss and it just, I don't know, I can't, caffeine. I have kicked so many bad habits in my life. Caffeine, for whatever reason, is just, I can't do it. Yeah. I've tried before, but I think I can get there eventually.

I'm just not sure if that's one. I'm not going to go just yet. I did about six months without caffeine in 2019, 2020. It fucking sucks. Yeah. It's a life not worth living. I haven't made it more than a day. So,

I haven't. I quit just because my wife gave me so much shit. I did it to prove that I could. And then I, you know, I had a few months where I'm like, you know, I'm going to see if this really makes a difference.

And then I got like three or four months in. And I'm like, this sucks. Like, I miss caffeine. And I went back to it. It's glorious. And when I don't have it,

it's just like everything is like dull. And honestly, like colors look different to me. Like it's pretty. Pretty wild, which obviously like just highlights how much dependent. I mean, if you're going to be dependent on anything, it's not the worst thing. It's probably the best. Cool.

All right, man. That's a wrap. That's the pod. Just a quick reminder, if you're watching this on YouTube, to go to the Sutter Art Not Giving a Fuck podcast YouTube channel. We're moving the whole podcast over in July. You'll be able to watch everything there. So make sure you go over, subscribe there. New episodes will stop showing up on the Mark Manson channel.

soon. See you there.