Don't Just Set Goals, Ship 'em 🚢

Hey Growth Gang,

Today’s newsletter is all about goals. If you’re reading this right now, I’m going to go ahead and guess that you have some big ones you’re chasing. You probably think about your biggest ones multiple times a day.

After all, goals are the starting point of personal growth. Everyone needs them. The problem is, most people do have goals—even those who find little success.

Humans love talking about their ambitious ideas and dreams, but so few actually achieve them.

Why is that, and how can we achieve more of the goals we set out to do? This is the question we need to focus on.

While goals are important, let me reemphasize that successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals.

High achievers don’t find their success simply by setting ambitious goals. They put vehicles for growth in place—systems that constantly guide them toward their destinations.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

• James Clear

Plan Your Route, and Define How to Traverse it

So you’ve found your destination. Maybe you want to be healthier, make a million dollars, and live a happy life.

Before you start spinning your wheels chasing after it, you need to prepare your ship.

So many people skip this part and jump into what they think or feel will bring them to their goal. Don’t make this mistake.

How do you know if you’re making this mistake?

You take action on the days you feel like it and lack consistency. You convince yourself you’re doing something productive for your goal, but a month later you’re not any closer to reaching it.

We need to practice being aware of this tendency and instead be deliberate about designing a practical, sustainable route to actually get there.

There are 3 steps to this:

1. Clearly define what your desired outcome is.

I want to run a marathon.

2. Break down the outcome into distinct objectives that directly relate to the success of the outcome.

In order to run a marathon, I have to:

• Build up my weekly total to 50 miles per week.

• Run 20 miles in one go.

• Stay injury free.

Important: If you’re not confident about the objectives necessary to achieve your goal, spend some time figuring that out. We live in a beautiful age where that information is easily accessible to you. Hundreds of people have undoubtedly already asked your same question online and had it answered by people that really know their stuff.

3. Build up my weekly total to 50 miles per week.
4. Run 20 miles in one go.
5. Stay injury free.
6. Create a game plan to achieve those objectives, in the form of key results.

In order to be able to run 20+ miles at once, and comfortably do 40 miles per week, I will:

• Sleep 7.5 hours per night.

• Fuel my body with nutritious food and drink a 3L of water a day.

• Increase my weekly mileage by 10% week over week.

• Listen to my body, and ease off of miles if I feel injury looming.

7. Sleep 7.5 hours per night.
8. Fuel my body with nutritious food and drink a 3L of water a day.
9. Increase my weekly mileage by 10% week over week.
10. Listen to my body, and ease off of miles if I feel injury looming. If you work for a startup or in big tech, this formula might sound familiar to you (thanks Andy Grove).

The more you take on this way of thinking, you’ll soon find that achieving success in anything you’re chasing after is less about taking extreme measures and more about being deliberate and persistent.

Pull Up Your Anchors

Before you depart, you have to identify and address the anchors that will weigh you down.

These anchors are often physical (a cluttered workspace that hinders focus) and social (toxic relationships that drain your energy and motivation).

Be as objective as you can about this.

Distancing myself from certain people was the hardest but most impactful thing I did to replace some of my stickiest bad habits with good ones.

When you’re able to free yourself from people that drain your motivation and drive to take action and replace them with people that energize and inspire you, your life will start building itself in inconceivable ways.

It’s a whole lot easier to take action on your goals when you’re surrounded by people taking action on their own ambitious dreams.

Of course, anchors aren’t limited to the physical and social realm alone. Unhealthy habits, self-doubt, fear of failure, or even excessive perfectionism can also act as invisible anchors.

Acknowledge these internal barriers. Reframe your mindset. Work on your self-compassion. Embrace a growth-oriented perspective.

Now that all that extra weight is gone, you can really start moving.

Tie Yourself to the Mast

You've pointed your ship in the right direction. You’ve pulled up your anchors. You feel the winds of growth starting to push you forward.

It’s time to stay the course.

Sounds easy, right? In theory, yes. But systems don’t work unless you stick to them, and this is where 99% of people get stuck.

At first, you will undoubtedly encounter resistance.

So...what do you do? You tie yourself to that dang ship and keep going.

Even with a seemingly never-ending journey in front of you, you need to embrace any feelings of doubt and uncertainty and put your trust in the process. You’ve already set yourself up for success.

As you immerse yourself deeper in the process, you'll discover that those initial doubts dissolve, replaced by a sense of purpose as you move faster towards your destination. You’re cruising now.

You will always** **hit new obstacles along the way; but having built your ship on sustainable, resilient systems, you can confidently maintain your focus on the destination, even during these moments of hardship.

Measure Your Progress and Make Adjustments

You don’t know if something isn’t working if you’re not measuring it. And you don’t know why it’s not working unless you’re not measuring your inputs.

How does a chemist know if a new catalyst is any better than the last one they made if its catalytic activity isn’t benchmarked? There’s a reason why science has been able to continuously innovate for centuries, all while using the same principles. They work—and work well.

If we all measured and iterated on our systems as if they were null hypotheses to disprove, we’d probably reach our goals more often and a whole lot quicker.

One way I like to measure my progress is through habit tracking. As humans, we like seeing numbers go up, and it motivates us to watch our work compound over time.

The growth output of your systems is its habits multiplied by the length of those habits’ streaks. If you’re not tracking habits, whether that’s exercising, reading for 30 minutes, eating a nutritious dinner, or learning a new skill to accelerate your career, I really can’t stress enough how important it is to measure this stuff.

Spreadsheets, notebooks, calendars, apps—it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it’s something you can use every day and stick to it. If apps are your thing, I built a habit tracker that I use daily to track & build new habits (it’s free).

Measure your progress obsessively, and iterate frequently. Pretty soon you’ll have systems and processes that are not only driving you toward your goals, but also bring you genuine happiness every day of your life.

It really is all about the journey, so set yourself up for a good one.

Hope y’all enjoyed this week’s edition!

Cheers to a productive week of goal smashing 🪴📈

Jake

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This was originally published on my weekly newsletter Circadian Growth