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How to design a masterful future without setting goals you don't really want
Chase Arbeiter
May 17, 2023
Setting goals can often be counterproductive and hinder our progress toward building our ideal life.
A few years ago, I read a quote from Joan Rivers, the comedian, talking about a blank schedule, "If my book ever looked like this, it would mean that nobody wants me, that everything I ever tried to do in life didn't work. Nobody cared and I've been forgotten."
How sad, right?
Rivers, an accomplished and highly successful comedian, had tied her identity (and happiness) to whether or not her schedule was full. A goal that, no doubt, probably served her quite well at some point in her career, which now hindered her from finding satisfaction.
Your ability to know how you want to spend your time in the future is far more consequential to your life than setting another vanity metric goal in the present.
The wrong goals bring on unnecessary stress and impossible schedules to sustain, leading to tasks you'll regret spending time on later.
The right goals lead to a life you enjoy, a life you don't need to escape from, and a daily process you're excited to wake up to each morning.
Unfortunately, many people choose vanity goals to power their life, only to discover that it's not what they really want from life.
But what if you were to view your life goals on this single foundational question: What does my ideal day look like?
Here are three questions I think about often to serve me in life and help me grow closer and closer to the future I want.
What are 3-5 practices that give me my best days?
Do you know how you want to spend your mornings in the peak years of your life?
NFL coaches put together meticulous game plans for their games every Sunday. They know how they want to attack an opponent, the pace they want to run their offense, and even "script" their first 15 offensive play calls.
Your life deserves the same level of commitment in its design.
Take a piece of paper and write down the five things you want to do daily: things that make you happy, bring your energy, and are always worth doing.
Now, with these powerful practices in mind, make a schedule that permits time for them.
Your day should revolve around these energy-enhancing practices. Not be something you try and fit in when you can.
What will I regret in the future?
I read a great article from Sahil Bloom a few months ago, Life Lessons from 1,000 Years. In it, Sahil polled several 90-year-olds with this question, "If you could speak to your 32-year-old self, what advice would you give?"
There were some incredibly insightful answers, but I believe you could sum it up pretty well with this:
Be cautious with how you spend your time
Who you spend your time with
What you waste your time on
Living to be 90 without a few regrets is impossible.
Living life consciously and choosing to limit those regrets is wise.
And nothing will determine this more than how you spend your time.
Does this help me get closer or further away from my ideal day?
Having filters to help guide us removes the pressure so we don't chase everything that shows up in front of us.
"If one does not know to which port one is sailing," wrote Seneca, "no wind is favorable."
Most people don't know the direction they're sailing.
Their filter for answering questions regarding opportunity and choices is much simpler:
MORE!
More money. More tasks on a schedule. More on their to-do list.
More directionless actions toward nowhere.
All the while never realizing until it's too late that all those "mores" accumulated into a life they don't actually enjoy their day.
It's not worth it.
That's not living.
And all the promotions, important meetings, and commas on your net worth don't matter much if your daily process is miserable.
Choose wisely.
Final Thoughts…
I believe we don't spend much time thinking about our ideal day because we've never been taught this. We've been trained, encouraged, motivated, and pushed to create results: money, possessions, and status.
But there are significant repercussions on the back end.
If you don't enjoy your day-to-day process, you'll have difficulty enjoying life. It's that simple.
This is the ugly truth about pursuing external benchmarks that nobody talks about.
How you spend your time, who you spend your time with, and what you spend your time on play a massive role in your life. And no amount of grind, hustle, or motivation can push you through that.
Morgan Housel has some excellent advice for anyone pursuing life through internal benchmarks:
“The only way to consistently do what you want, when you want, with whom you want, for as long as you want, is to detach from other peoples' benchmarks and judge everything simply by whether you're happy and fulfilled, which varies person to person.”
Life is hard enough.
Don't add on the burden of not enjoying your daily structure.
Double down on the things that energize you, that you never regret, and with the people you love the most.
And work hard to eliminate as many of the things you don't enjoy, steal your energy, and will cause regret in your future.