Most goal-setting advice tells you to be realistic. Build on last year’s numbers. Pick a target you can actually hit.
I think that advice is how capable people stall out for years without noticing. Careful goals produce careful results. They almost never produce the jump that changes where a company or a person ends up.
After years at Scaling.com watching hundreds of founders try to build companies that actually matter, I’ve landed somewhere different. The goals worth chasing are usually the ones you have no idea how to reach yet. I call them “impossible goals,” though I don’t mean they can’t be done. I mean that from where you’re standing right now, you can’t see the path.
That missing path is the part everyone wants to skip past before they start. It’s also the only part that ever does anything.
Why the Stretch Works
Chase a goal you already know how to reach, and your head stays on familiar ground. You use the habits you’ve got and the moves that got you this far, and you get about what you’d expect, which is a little more of the same.
Commit to something so big, or so soon, that you honestly don’t know how you’ll pull it off, and you’re somewhere else. You have to think in ways the old playbook never asked for. You go looking for help and angles you never needed before. You end up working at a level no comfortable goal was ever going to require of you.
I’ve come to think a goal like that is less a measurement of what you can do and more the thing that gets the capacity out of you in the first place, usually at a time you’d rather it didn’t.
37 Pounds in Five and a Half Months
I didn’t figure this out in a meeting. I figured it out on a bathroom scale, looking at 208 pounds, annoyed with myself, and changing nothing about it.
I’d been thinking about getting in shape for months. I thought about it constantly and started none of it, because there was always a clean reason it could begin tomorrow. If you’ve ever wanted something badly and still gone nowhere on it, you know the feeling. That habit costs you in your own life. It costs more when a company is running on it.
What I finally understood was that discipline wasn’t the problem. The goal was. A reasonable goal gave me unlimited room to wait, so I got rid of the room. I registered for a men’s physique show five and a half months out. Five-foot-nine, 208 pounds, no training program, no diet, none of it.
Registering ended the waiting that same afternoon. There was no starting Monday, because Monday was already behind. The goal was too big and the clock too short for an easy ramp into it. Within a week, I’d rearranged most of my life around the thing. I hired a coach. I put a gym in the house so I couldn’t blame my schedule. I got bloodwork. I rebuilt what I ate down to the gram. I was on a treadmill before it got light and under a bar after work every day, including the days I didn’t want to be.
What changed wasn’t that I wanted it more. I was answerable to it. Being answerable to something that takes everything you’ve got is one of the strongest positions a person can put themselves in, and almost nobody does it on purpose.
Five and a half months later, I was 171 pounds, and I walked out onto that stage. I dropped the weight, but the number isn’t what I held onto. What stayed with me was the proof of something I now bring into every business I work on. A hard goal changes the result, and it also changes whoever is producing it, and the change in the person lasts a lot longer than the result.
Daniel Burnham, the architect, said something more than a century ago that has stuck around: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.” He was talking about buildings. He was also describing what the size of a plan does to the person holding it.
What Careful Costs
I keep running into the same contradiction. Most business owners play it safe on paper—they set conservative, achievable revenue targets each year, the kind of growth that won’t embarrass them at the next board meeting. Conventional advice reinforces this: set realistic goals and benchmarks, double revenue year over year at most, stay on the curve. Yet when you get those same owners talking honestly—over coffee, off the record—nearly three in four believe their revenue will keep climbing, and a striking number will admit they think their company is capable of multiplying its revenue several times over within a few years. The ceiling they set publicly is nowhere near the one they secretly believe exists.
So the people who believe a big leap is on the table are mostly still writing down the small one. The distance between what they privately believe and what they commit to in public is where most of the growth sits, and it mostly stays there.
If you did $2 million last year, the normal move is to aim at $2.2 million. You get normal results from normal inputs, which is fine right up until you want something that isn’t normal. The more useful question is the uncomfortable one. What would it take to do $10 million, and who would you have to become, who would you have to hire and what would you have to stop doing this week to get there?
Those questions don’t have comfortable answers, which is the reason to ask them. Not knowing the answer is the pressure that forces a different kind of thinking, and nothing gentler gets you there.
People also get the focus part backwards. A big goal looks like it would scatter you, and it does the opposite. A modest goal leaves you a hundred reasonable things you could be doing, and a hundred reasonable options is how effort gets spread thin enough to stop mattering. A goal you don’t know how to reach throws most of those options out for you. It tells you what counts and what doesn’t, and that clarity is what actually moves the number.
Plan from where you’re trying to go, not from where you’ve been. Your history can only report what you have already done. The thing you’re aiming at is the only place that can tell you what’s still available, and it turns out to be a better planning tool than your track record.
Setting One That Works
Not every big goal does this. The ones that do tend to have five things in common.
Make it specific. “Grow the business” is a wish. “$10 million by December 31” is something you can be measured against, and being measurable is what gives it weight.
Keep it single. Split your ambition across five goals and you’ve watered down all five. One goal, with everything behind it.
Set a deadline that’s too soon for comfort. The deadline is the engine. Compress it, and the urgency does the work of getting you moving now instead of next quarter.
Make it big enough to break how you currently operate. If you can already see the whole route, the goal is too small. It should sit a step past what you know how to do.
Tie it to a reason you actually care about. The goals that hold up under strain were never really about what you’d own at the end. They were about what you’d be part of and what it would mean, and that is what keeps a goal non-negotiable once it gets hard, which it will.
The Goal You’re Already Avoiding
You know the goal you’re not setting. Not because it’s fuzzy to you. It’s too clear. You can already see what it would cost, what it would take and how far past your current life it would make you live.
So you set a smaller one whose path you can already trace. The trouble with a goal you can already solve is that it isn’t really a goal, it’s a task with a nicer name on it.
The people who change a company or an industry or their own life aren’t thinking one notch further than everyone around them. They’re working at a different scale entirely. Modest goals give you modest results. A goal you don’t know how to reach tends to leave behind a different person than the one who set it, and for most people, that is the part actually worth chasing.
So pick the one that sounds slightly crazy when you say it to another person. The one with no plan attached to it. The one where the gap between where you are and where it would put you is almost embarrassing to say out loud. Everyone who ever changed anything was standing in exactly that gap when they started.
Featured image from Gorgev/Shutterstock
