Warning: Written Goals Will Stifle Your Dreams

TL; DR: Writing down your goals will work. It also sets a limit on what you can get. Instead, put your goals into a dynamic, living document. I’ll show you how in the Tool of the Week at the end of the email.

Let’s start with a quick story for Valentine’s Day.

Every year, around this time, I tell people that I first met my wife at the library.

So if you’re alone and want to meet someone special, start reading more books. Or better yet, just go out into the world and do things. You’ll find each other.

But of course, there’s more to the story than that.

You see, a few months before I met her, I wrote down an exact description of the kind of person I wanted to date. I went deep into the qualities I wanted her to have, and I didn’t hold back on the physical details, either.

One of the steps to having something extraordinary is to write down what you want.

But did you know there are pros and cons to putting your dreams in writing?

The Limited Dream Trap

You may already know about the powerful natural forces that come to your aid when you write down your goals.

You fend off distractions by reminding yourself of what you’re fighting for. You enlist your unconscious mind to solve problems for you in the background. You train the Reticular Activating System in your brain to search for the resources and opportunities you need.

But there’s a flaw in this tactic.

When you put something in writing, you lock it up. You put a limit on what you can achieve, and you block the possibility of getting something even better.

Let me give you an example.

I once had a dream of living in Italy. After some research, I thought my best chance was to become an English teacher.

I wrote down the goal of becoming an English teacher in Italy, and achieved this relatively quickly.

Along the way, several opportunities came up for jobs in tourism. I ignored these, because I was focusing all my attention on becoming an English teacher.

But during my second year in Italy, I took a temporary summer job as a tour manager. The first week, I made more than I could earn in a month of teaching.

The rest of the summer was a rich kaleidoscope of travel, socializing, and money that made my jaw drop.

I was getting paid handsomely to travel around Italy, Greece, and Turkey on buses and cruise ships, hanging out with fascinating people and doing things I never could have afforded on a teacher’s salary.

There were days I went back to my hotel room with a month’s rent in my pocket just from the tips.

The only downside was realizing I had wasted a year scratching out a humble living as an English teacher, because I had told myself that was the goal.

Know What You Really Want

The first thing you should do is make sure the goal you write down is the one you really want. I wrote down “I am an English teacher in Italy” but what I really wanted was to live in Italy, preferably in style.

Read your goal out loud and pay attention to how it makes you feel.

Doing this might make you feel unhappy, or even slightly sick.  It could feel like you’re being stifled or forced to do something that doesn’t resonate.

These are all signs that you've written a goal that you think you're supposed to have. You’ve let other people tell you what you want. You haven't chosen a goal; it’s been assigned to you.

These kinds of goals don't work without serious consequences because they're not in alignment with who you are and who you want to be.

It will be a lot harder to reach this kind of goal, and if you do it won’t bring you lasting happiness. 

Another possibility is that you won't feel anything as you read your written goal.

If that's the case, it’s time to be more ambitious. Maybe you haven't chosen something you want badly enough. Maybe the goal isn’t going to make a big enough change in who you are and create the growth you’re craving.

Ask yourself, “How can I make this bigger and more ambitious?”

When you have the right answer, something amazing begins to happen.

The Transformation Goal

As you pursue your goal, there's a question you should constantly be asking yourself, especially when you're feeling stuck or when you have to make a tough decision:

“How would I act if I had achieved this already?”

The right level of challenge and ambition will refine your mind, body, and spirit. You are no longer just someone pursuing a dream, you’re on a Hero’s Journey. The pursuit of your goal becomes an adventure.

The adventure transforms you into the person who is capable of achieving the goals you have written down. You become a better version of yourself, and this makes reaching your goal inevitable.

When you read your goal out loud and feel excited, that’s a good sign.

If you’re also a little bit nervous or afraid, it means you're pushing back against the limitations that have been living inside of you.

This is a goal that will transform you.

Your Dynamic Document

Written goals do work. I did achieve the goal I originally wrote down, and I was teaching at Berlitz in Rome within a few months.

The problem was that I missed out on something even better.

The way out of this conundrum is to write your goals in a dynamic, living document. You have to energize them and keep them alive and flexible.

This will get you what you want a lot faster. Often it brings you something much better.

Let me show you how.

Tool of the Week: Breathe Life Into Your Written Dreams

1. Write goals that resonate, that enable you to expand and become a better person, which challenge you and scare you a little bit.

2. Rewrite your goals each day. As you do, feel free to tweak them and refine them as things begin to happen and you get clearer on what you want. This makes it easier to keep the focus created by having a written goal, as well as reminding your unconscious (and any other powers that are listening) that you are flexible in what will come about.

3. Read each goal out loud and focus on how it makes you feel.

4. Imagine your dreams fulfilled and feel the emotion and sensations you will have. These feelings and emotions are the real goal, and the more you can feel them in advance the more you’ll strengthen the synapses in your brain that create what you want.

5. Do one thing every day to reach your goal. Celebrate this success, no matter how small it is.

That wraps it up for this week.

If you’re enjoying these rants, lessons, and tools, I would love to hear from you.

If you’re not, I would like to hear from you even more.

Reply to this email and tell me what you think, what you’d like to see in the future, or just to drop me a line about your cat.

I don’t always have the time to reply to your message, but I read every one of them.

Jacob