Miletones vs. Goals

Be wary if you find yourself saying “it will all be worth it in the end.” It won’t be. Big, audacious goals provide a way for us to prioritize how we spend our limited time, but we often define them long before we get into the work of achieving them. If you hate the path, the destination won’t make up for it.

Let’s break this down a bit.

A goal is something you want to achieve. It is not defined by the work it takes, rather by the outcome it hopes to create. Defining goals precisely can be quite hard. They often take on more subjective definitions. The best ones aren’t just the last milestone in a long line, rather have an aspiration and outcome bent. They often sound silly because of this, but their grandeur can be intoxicating, blinding you along the way.

A milestone is usually a point in some project where you have set a specific set of criteria that you must meet. There are usually multiple milestones in a big project. Often they are defined with numbers. You can check them off.

Take a personal example. Your stated goal is to run a marathon. You think you will achieve it when you run 26.2 miles and can still walk after the finish.

That “26.2” bumper sticker for your car won’t come without preparation. Your course of training will include a set of milestones. Run this far by this date. Run at this pace for this long. Those milestones will be lonely and hard. They will likely not all be met on time. But they are measurable. You can fit them neatly on a to do list and check them off one by one.

Your plan is set, you are on your way. You think it will be cool to run this ridiculously random distance with others. The new shoes look great and the music selection for training is top notch.

There are three likely paths from here.

Path 1. You give up. You give it a go, but after a few milestones decide you hate running. You hit the first couple of milestones. You ask yourself why anyone would do this (a legit question) and move on with your life. I think this is a great success. In trying to meet the milestones you learned the experience of running wasn’t for you and therefore the goal wasn’t worth it. You started and you tried. But you hated the milestones. You are worried what others will think about quitting, but don’t. Kudos. You dreamed, you lived, and you learned.

Path 2. You go from hating running to hating running even more, but you don’t give up. The long, lonely hours just suck and it’s either too hot, too cold, too dry, or too wet to enjoy any single run. There is always something in your way. You meet your milestones, but it’s a grind. There is some satisfaction in merely surviving the training regime. You can brag to people about it. Maybe you bail, but since you are you, you don’t give up easily. You get to the day of the marathon and you pull it off. But now you are left with a big so what? Was your goal to be miserable thru 26.2 miles? Probably not. It was to run a marathon, not curse your way through every step.

Path 3. Boston watch out, there is new qualifier about to earn their bib. You found something you were missing but didn’t know it. Running isn’t a grind, but a joy. You love the rain because it cools you. You love the hills because you know they are pushing you. The work is hard, but the experience of the miles is positive, not just an exercise in counting. You discover the podcasts you’ve missed out on and the miles just tick off. You run that marathon and even at the hardest part, there is a part of you that is getting joy from the struggle. (There is also a part of you that is ready to fall on to the street. And a part of you that desperately needs a Port-a-Poty even though you just went.) That single marathon, it turns out, wasn’t the goal. The goal was exploring what you were capable of on foot.

Path 1 and 3 are both success stories. Path 2 is the failure case. And Path 2 is an archetypal path we all fall into sometimes. In our careers, we want a promotion, but don’t want the job of any of our bosses. We spend years accumulating milestones and maybe accomplishing some goals, but not actually enjoying the experience of it. We want a particular job because of the pay, title, or perceived influence, but not for the actual work the job entails.

The real truth is that finishing the marathon isn’t that special. It’s only a few hours out of the hundreds you’ve run to get there. If you didn’t enjoy the hundreds of hours, why would the last 4 (your first one is going to be slow) make any difference? Of course they don’t.

If you don’t enjoy the milestones, you won’t enjoy accomplishing the goal. Stop now. Find a new goal. Define new milestones and start again. Realize experience isn’t accomplishing the goal, rather all the steps along the way where life actually happened. The only failure is grinding away in the belief that somehow it all changes in the end.