You Can’t “Goal-Set” Your Way to a Breakthrough

Rethinking Big Audacious Goals

When I was a 17-year-old high school runner spending my summer days quite unproductively running nine miles in the morning, watching movies all day, and then running another eight miles in the evening, I would often go into a day dream like state on my runs. It was the only way to get through the scorching heat, sweltering humidity, and general unpleasantness that is a Houston, Texas, summer. Years later, I can still remember those dreams and the goals they often entailed.

I would be running my standard loop, that I ran practically every day, when, as I reached the 3-mile mark, taking the left turn at the elementary school, my mind would drift away. It would drift towards winning the state championship in Austin, or, if I was feeling particularly ambitious, to Eugene, Oregon, as I ran the Prefontaine Classic mile as the latest high school phenom to join the venerable ranks of athletes who have competed at that prestigious race.

At the time, I had no right to have these dreams. I was a kid with an official mile best of 4:17, good but not great by the standards I’d hoped for, and an eternity from the four-minute mile that I dreamed of. But those were the dreams and that was the goal. My foolishness served me well, as nine months later I would get to live out those dreams, although ending up on just the wrong side of four minutes (4:01.02)

One would think that this story would be a wonderful endorsement for goal setting. But, in my view, it wasn’t the goal-setting that mattered.

With the individuals I work with now, I seldom have them write down their goals. They’re free to come up with them on their own, but there aren’t any traditional goal setting meetings. We might talk about things we want to accomplish and what’s possible, but there’s never any explicit goals being set. While this runs counter to the culture that states that we have to have goals to know where we are going, I think the non-goal approach makes more sense.

In his book, The Demon-Haunted World, scientist Carl Sagan discusses unintended consequences, where he makes a brilliant point:

“Maxwell wasn’t thinking of radio, radar, and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnetism; Newton wasn’t dreaming of space flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon; Roentgen wasn’t contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it ‘X-rays’; Curie wasn’t thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn’t planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mold; Watson and Crick weren’t imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA; Rowland and Molina weren’t planning to implicate CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of halogens in stratospheric photochemistry.

…Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?”

Sagan’s point is that sometimes doing science for basic curiosity is what leads to the next major breakthrough. If we allow scientists to scratch that itch, do basic research in understanding the way the world functions, the benefits will follow. As Sagan pointed out, we don’t have to set out and make a mandate that we are creating the next big thing. Rather, just about every other breakthrough invention came about from people following their curiosity towards understanding.

In other words, they were exploiting their innate curiosity for the process’s sake. We stumbled our way to these miraculous breakthroughs.

In one of my best books of 2025, Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman bring data to Sagan’s observations in their book Why Greatness Cannot be Planned. They make the argument that big goals are too distant to be much of a guide. They can act as hope or a dream. But they don’t help us get there, because there are too many unknown stepping stones in between. We don’t know what path gets us from A to Z. We can only see options B or C in front of us. And by emphasizing the big goal, we often unintentionally reward what looks like progress right now, instead of what is actual progress if we could see the big picture.

In running, the example would be if we just hammered crazy hard intervals for a few weeks. It’d look like we were making progress to our big goal as our times come down. But inevitably, we’d stall or burnout from intensity. And what we really needed to do is put in a big base for a few months where our times didn’t really improve much at all, but it set us up for a big jump once we started to sharpen.

Stanley and Lehman called this process “collecting stepping stones.” Meaning, we don’t know exactly what stones we need to step on to get to our ultimate goal, but if we have a broad based, have explored widely, we’re more likely to eventually find our way. If we choose a singular path early, then if it dead ends, we’re out of look. Or in there phrasing, out of stepping stones.

One particular striking example was in their work training robots to solve maze like problems. If you programmed the robot with a goal (i.e., get closer to the reward at the end of the maze) it tended to get closer sooner, but then got trapped ina kind of cul-de-sac near the goal, but never reaching it. Instead if the robot was programmed for searching based on novelty (i.e., is this new, have I explored here before?) initial progress was slower, but it ultimately succeeded.

Too often, we hear that we should set big hairy audacious goals or SMART goals. But the reality is that unless that goal is the next step, or we can see it, it ultimately can backfire. It narrows our path. It pushes us to do things that make us appear like we’re getting closer in the short term, but maybe not what’s needed to clear the path over the long haul.

Instead of big goals, we need to explore, get curious, collect stones, and keep our paths open. As Stanley and Lehman put it, “Instead of judging every activity for its potential to succeed, we should judge our projects for their potential to spawn more projects.”

If you would have told me when I finished college that I wouldn’t be coaching full time and would be writing smart self-help books that mix science, history, and personal experience, I would have said no way… But the only reason I ended up on this path is because I kept it open. I didn’t “niche down” and only write about how to run a faster 5k. I let my curiosity drive the ship. Writing about a wide variety of things, and trusting that it would find its audience, or that the runners and coaches in my audience would get the connection. Sometimes, the path meandered to a dead end. But more often than not, it allowed me to find somewhere new and exciting that exceeded my expectations.

It’s why whenever I’m stuck, unsure of where to go, I simply come back to one of my core values in my working life: do interesting things. It’s how I figure out what topic to cover in my next book. It’s not based on some optimization algorithm of what will sell the most copies. It’s simply: what can sustain my attention for the next 3-4 years of researching and writing.

Too often, in our world of optimizing everything, we become slaves to the goal. You organize your writing around what will get the most shares. You create social media posts based on potential virality. Or like many big podcasters, you create episodes based on what data science tells you will blow up. What a depressing way to live as a creative. And more so, I’d bet it makes us like the little robot, getting really close to a goal, but ultimately wandering in circles for eternity.

We stumble our way to breakthroughs. Yes, when I’m working with someone it’s my job to meticulously guide them. But as I always like to point out to them, you can’t force a breakthrough. You have to prepare yourself and put yourself in position to take advantage of the situation. But you can’t force it.

— Steve