You Keep Setting Goals You Cannot Do

Try something. Take the goal you care about most right now, and do it.

Not work on it. Not think about it. Do it. This minute.

You can't. Nobody can. You cannot do "lose ten pounds." You cannot do "finish the book," or "grow the business to half a million," or "run a marathon by June." None of those is something a body can perform at 7:15 on a Tuesday. They are places. And a goal written as a place is one of the most common reasons a perfectly good goal quietly dies.

It passes every test

Here is what makes this hard to see. The goal looks excellent.

Run "lose ten pounds by March 1st" through the standard checklist. Specific? Ten pounds. Measurable? The scale will tell you. Achievable? For most people, over five months, yes. Relevant? It matters to you. Time-bound? March 1st.

It passes every test. It earns a gold star from every goal-setting worksheet ever printed.

And it contains zero instructions.

Nothing in that sentence tells you what to do tomorrow morning. So tomorrow morning, you decide. And the morning after that. Every day between now and March, the goal hands you a blank and asks you to fill it in from scratch, with whatever energy you happen to have. On a good day you fill it in well. On an ordinary day you fill it in with "tomorrow."

That daily decision is where goals go to die. Not in some dramatic collapse. In a small, reasonable renegotiation that happens because the goal never told you what the deal was.

The Address

I call it The Address.

An outcome goal is an address. It tells you exactly where you want to end up. It is precise, measurable, dated, and completely silent about how to get there. You would never hand someone a street address and call it directions. Yet that is what most of us do with the things we care about most. Then we read the result as a character flaw. I'm just not disciplined.

You are not undisciplined. You have been navigating without directions, and every single day you have been asked to invent the route again.

The SMARTER framework I teach actually has a letter for this. A, for Actionable: translate the goal into repeatable behaviors, and focus on actions rather than outcomes. It is the letter people skip, and I understand why. By the time you reach it, the goal already feels finished. The S, the M and the T were all satisfied by the number. The number did such a convincing impression of a plan that nobody noticed there wasn't one.

The goal was a verb

There was a period when I started running on the beach. Nothing about the beginning was impressive. One kilometer, maybe two. Slow. Uneven. Inconsistent.

The decision I made was not a distance. It was one sentence: I would show up every day. Walk, run, swim, calisthenics. Then the next day, repeat.

One kilometer became two. Two became five. Eventually ten (about six miles), and distances that once felt impossible became normal.

I have always told that story as a lesson about consistency. It is also a lesson about grammar. Ten kilometers arrived as the side effect of a verb I kept. Had I written "run 10K" at the top of a page, every morning would have opened with the gap between one and ten, and a gap that size mostly produces reasons to stay in bed. "Show up" had no gap. By the end of the day it was either done or not done. There was nothing to negotiate.

That is the deeper cost of The Address. It does not only leave you without instructions. It hands you a daily scorecard you are guaranteed to lose. Every morning you are not there yet. The distance between you and the address becomes the loudest number in your life, and it says the same thing every day: not yet.

A verb reports something different. It reports whether you did today's part. And most days, if the verb is the right size, you did.

Keep the number. Move it.

None of this means throwing the number away. The number is useful. It is how you will know, months from now, whether you chose the right verb. It just changes jobs. It stops being the goal and becomes the thing you are watching for.

The goal becomes a verb with a time and a place attached, small enough that you would keep it on an ordinary week. Not a perfect week. An ordinary one.

"Lose ten pounds" becomes: I strength train Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 a.m. in the garage. Watching for: ten pounds by March.

"Finish the book" becomes: I write 300 words before I open email, five days a week. Watching for: a full draft by June.

Look at what changed. The first version asked for a decision every day. The second asks for one decision, once.

The exercise: The Directions Test

Ten minutes. One goal.

1. Write the goal exactly as it currently lives in your head.
2. Run the test. If you were acting on this at 7:15 tomorrow morning, what exactly would you do? If the answer takes more than a second, or starts with "I'd figure out…", you are holding an address.
3. Write the directions as one sentence: I ________ (verb) ________ (when) ________ (where).
4. Demote the number. Underneath, write Watching for: followed by your original target and date.
5. Size it for your real week. Would you keep this verb on a normal week, the one you actually have? If not, shrink it until the answer is yes. A small verb you keep beats a big one you renegotiate.

Then put the verb in your calendar. The number goes somewhere you will see it once a week. Not every day.

An address tells you where you would be proud to arrive. A verb tells you what to do at 7:15. Only one of them has ever gotten anyone out of bed.

Where this goes from here

An article can hand you one test, for one goal, for one week. Coaching runs the same test across a whole life, where the addresses stack up and pull against each other, and every verb has to fit around a real family, a real job and a real body. That is the work I do with clients, and it is where these strategies stop being ideas and start being the way your weeks actually run.

So here is my ask. Run the Directions Test, then hit reply with two lines: the goal as you had it, and the verb you rewrote it into. I read every reply myself. I will tell you honestly whether the verb looks like it will hold. And if you want to explore what working together on the rest of your goals could look like, say so in the same reply and we will start there.

P.S. On Tuesday: what happens after you keep the verb, and why the one celebration most people schedule lands on exactly the wrong day.