Everyone loves setting goals. New year, new plans. New week, new habits. New project, new ambitions, etc. But if looking honestly, most goals fail, isn’t it! Ironically, they don’t fail because they’re too hard, they fail because they’re vague, emotional, or just unrealistic. If you find yourself missed your goals too many times, this post is for you. But this post will not provide you motivation, this post will expose your misperceptions, and knowing these misperceptions is the first step toward your goals.
1. You are making wishes, not goals
This is the most common misperceptions can be seen when looking into people’s todo list, or new year resolutions. People usually write their wishes instead of goals and completely not aware about the diff. For example, it is easy to see these lines in someone’s todo list: “to be better at something”, “build a great app”, “be rich”, “be happy”, “be confident”, etc. These lines won’t make any outcome, they are just wishes in a world without genie. A goal must be Specific & Measurable. And because it is Measurable, it will be Achievable.
To be Specific & Measurable, each goal must be written in a simple sentence using 1 number, 1 noun & 1 verb and a deadline. Example:
- deliver 1 feature every 3 days
- publish 10 blog posts in quarter 1
- run total 15km each week
- save 50% of salary each month
- read 1 page of any book each day
- …
If you can’t measure your actions, you can’t achieve the outcome. Focus on number, be familiar with scoring yourself. Be a project manager of your life, avoid saying vague words, be specific! Writing todo in this format will be the first step of realizing any goal. When all metrics are met, you goal! When metric is not met, at least you will know why.
2. You expect outcome happen over night
Good things take time. It is one rule for any goal. Outcome comes from concentrate, commitment and consistency, not from your commands. Outcome is compounded from tiny results each day.
Setting goals make illusions of fast results. When you set a goal, your brain immediately imagines the outcome, especially if you have an imaginative brain, you might lock yourself in your imaginary world without notice the boundary with your reality. Although the outcome is imaginary, it somehow triggers dopamine in your brain and you “feel” success. That mental picture feels real but you skips the process entirely. You likely borrow dopamine from your future but any borrowing need to be paid. And when life pull you back to its reality, when someone or something reminds you about your goals, which are not completed yet, a crack appears inside your world and that crack hurts a lot. It triggers other toxic hormones as well. And this might explain symptoms that many people avoid to mention again their goals, or go outrage if someone mentions it.
Expecting fast outcomes creates a dangerous loop: You start strong, You don’t see results quickly, You feel discouraged then You quit or switch goals. This loop waste your time, energy and mind a lot and it is harmful than you think. Not because the goal was wrong, but because your timeline was unrealistic. Treat your goals as seeds. It will grow slowly but for sure. Most meaningful outcomes come lates because it requires many many suitable conditions. They usually come after weeks or months of invisible effort. So, when making goals, at the deadline part, give it time, count in month is a good starting point.
3. You depend on emotions, not habits
Motivation! yeah it is the emotion everyone love. People even pay significantly to just attend some meetings that “sell” motivation. But then that motivation expired right after you left the meeting. It’s expensive, and smell like scam. Your brain don’t need that external motivation. You don’t need fake motivation.
Motivation is unreliable. At the beginning of any goal, motivation feels strong. You’re excited, focused, ready to act. But motivation is temporary. Some days you’ll feel tired, distracted or simply won’t feel like doing anything. You can burn out. No one gonna compliment you every time, everywhere. Not everyone understand your goals evenly. If your actions depend on how you feel, your progress will always be dependent on external conditions, aka you lose the control of your life.
Habits solve this problem by removing the need to decide what to do every day. Build a daily routine that make you harder to fail than succeed. No debate. No negotiation. You don’t rely on energy—you rely on structure of a day you will spend. Remember sleepy days, rainy days, hot as hell days but you still have to complete 5 classes before go to bed. That is a sample of how to complete a goal. Structure your timeline and turn it into habit. Sciences proved that any your actions can turn into habits after 3 weeks. After that threshold, you will act unconsciously toward your goal.
Habits are not just actions—they shape your identity. You don’t “try to work out”, you just run every morning at 5AM. You don’t “try to learn” , you just studies every night at 8PM, etc. Be specific about when you do what and repeat it daily. You can spend 1 month to test this theory and see (not feel) the result.
4. You review other too much instead of yourself
Comparison! It is not easy feeling but everyone unconsciously does that, at least for a while when they were younger. This is normal behavior and is a source of motivation. But because we learn to not depend on motivation here, comparison is unnecessary too. Comparison slows you down more than you think.
It’s easy to spend time analyzing others on what they’re doing, how fast they’re growing, what strategies they use. It feels like learning, even productive when you absorb new information. At some extent, this gives you hints on how to do a stuff and keep you moving, but if too much, it counter attack you by wasting your time. Your progress stands still while you make comparison with other. In the worst part, when you focus too much on others, two things may happen: You feel behind too far – then you feel discouraged, or You copy blindly – then you lack of direction. You might give up or try doing too many things, all at once, which is a fail-for-sure strategy. You end up reacting instead of building. You’re measuring your progress against someone else’s timeline, resources, and starting point—which you don’t fully see.
Progress doesn’t come from observing others. It comes from observing yourself. If you don’t review your own actions, you miss: what worked, what didn’t, where you wasted time, where you improved. Without this loop, you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Never expect that same methods would produce different results. Ignore others, focus on yourself. Track your progress toward your goals. Update the progress daily. Do not care about what other post on their social profiles such as LinkedIn or Facebook, many times they lies, or just exaggerate about themself. Real professional shows their result, not lines on their CV.
5. You work hard, but not deep
Given that you already have Specific & Measurable goals, with right habits that serve the goals, and completely ignore other people on social networks. Now you are going to be busy: each day, you answering messages, switching tasks, reacting to notifications, reading a few articles, check some news, write some code, draw something, and repeat that routine for 10 days already. You got busy all the time but your none of metric you set are met. What is wrong ? Is the right goal not just enough ? This busy seems not productive. It is distraction actually. It is not “deep” enough. Deep work is something like: You spend 7 continuous days to make a first version of your app then you spend 8 hours to complete a drawing, then you spend 8 hours to collect relevant information from articles and news, then you spend 2 hours to reply and react to messages and notifications. Same 10 days spent, but the result will be different.
Deep work is to focus in one goal in a long timespan, long enough to deliver a meaningful result. Don’t switch tasks too much because your brain is a single-threaded machine, not a multi-threaded one. Switching tasks can make you feel busy, productive, and do more but in fact, it creates movement, not meaningful progress. You waste time and energy when switching tasks because your brain has to switch the context, and lose the short-term-memory that is important for resolving difficult issues.
People has tendency to choose working hard instead of deep working. Working hard is easy to see, has small wins and human brain loves that feel. Deep work requires patience, honesty and creativity. Deep work does not gives instant satisfaction by small wins like hard work, but it forces you to confront what you don’t know, where you struggle and accept that how slow a progress can be – which is not an easy feel to most of people. And human brain has a default mode to choose the easy one. Working hard is good, but it is not enough to complete goals, meaningful ones!
6. You sense, but not score
How do you know you are doing a good work?
Let say you already spent 1 months focusing on one goal such as making a simple software, or building a website, or learning a new language. You barely switch tasks in 1 month. You focused on one goal. Good job, you are very close. Now it is the time to scoring yourself. And score is a number. For example for above sample goals, let gather data about: how many users want to use your new software, or, how many people go to your website, or, can you take an official language test yet, etc. Does that number met the metric you set ? If yes, wonderful, if no, lets find out!
It is completely okay to not be 10/10 per goal. It is not even matter. The honesty to yourself is matter and it will adjust your strategy when it sees that scores. Those scores act as feedbacks from reality. It measures the gap between your assumption and reality and can tell you whether you are on the right track. If the goal is not met even you escaped above 5 misperceptions, the wrong part is in your method, your approach, aka, in how you work on specific tasks. There must be some missing steps, or overdo steps, or wrong assumptions, or underrated steps.
This scoring habit is to calculate effectiveness. If it is not effective yet, let experiment other methods and again gather scores. After a few try, scores can tell you what works, what do not, and what you feel it work. Focus on what actually work only!
Scoring yourself has another psychological effects. It can train your brain to be open minded, flexible when you willing to adapt multiple methods for same goal, and get rid of some cognitive biases. Human brain has many cognitive biases, the common ones that can be fixed by scoring yourself are:
- Confirmation bias: You notice only evidence that supports what you already believe and ignore what contradicts it.
- Self-serving bias: You naturally credit yourself for what works and blame external factors for what do not work.
- Effort justification: You assume that because you put in effort, you’re making progress.
- Recency bias: You overvalue what happened recently.
- Optimism bias: You overestimate how well things are going, or will go.
- Availability bias: You judge based on what’s easiest to remember.
- Consistency bias: You resist admitting that your current approach isn’t working because you’ve already committed to it.
Escaping those biases, you can be stronger than ever!
7. You put yourself in wrong environment
Now your are strong, the goal is right, but progress is slow. What’s wrong now ?
Goals are like seeds. Good seeds can grow slowly due to wrong environment. Your progress is also, it speeds up or slows down depend a lot on where you are sitting, what you eat and who you collaborate with. Place, Food and Supporters is the environment that effect your goals the most.
Place – where you actually do the work. It can be an office, at home, or at certain kind of coffee shop. If your space is full of distractions, noise, or easy escapes, your focus will always be fragile. You’ll need constant willpower just to do basic work. Know yourself, measure yourself to understand where is the place gives you most productive work. Some people love work at office, some people love work at home, some love work at a coffee shop, some want to be near the sea, etc. Each person has different soul that decide where is their productive places. Some person has unique fear that decide where is not an easy escape environment. This is likely give you no retreat option so the only choice is moving forward.
Food — your hidden performance system. What you eat doesn’t just affect your health, it affects your energy, clarity, and consistency. Low-quality fuel brain can leads to: energy crashes, brain fog, inconsistent output. You might think you lack discipline, but sometimes you’re just under-fueled. You don’t need a perfect diet, but if your goal requires focus and long term effort, your body needs stable energy supply. So, always feed yourself well, then work.
Supporters — who shapes your standards. You don’t gonna need a big network but you do need the right people. The people around you influence: what you consider “normal”, how high you should aim and how you respond to feedbacks. If your environment tolerates excuses, you’ll make them. If it values growth, you’ll feel pressure to improve. Support doesn’t always mean encouragement or compliments. Most of time they don’t understand what you are doing. It is just their personality. It can be accountability, it can be honesty. Sometimes it’s just being around people who take things seriously. And the best person will be the one already make it, the one already achieve whatever goals you set. Learn from them is the best.
8. You have too many goals
Now you are super strong, your mind can focus, your body is full of energy, your environment is fit. The goal is close than ever. But not just too many goals!
Now here some other cognitive biases emerge! You need to fix them too:
- Shiny Object Syndrome: You’re attracted to new ideas simply because they’re new then you back to switching tasks.
- Opportunity Cost Neglect: You focus on what you gain from a new goal—but ignore what it costs then You overload yourself without realizing what you sacrificed.
- Overconfidence Bias: Because things are going well, you assume you can handle more. But you underestimate the cognitive load and split your attention.
- Planning Fallacy: You underestimate how long things actually take then you stack multiple goals on unrealistic timelines.
- FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): You get more excitement from starting than finishing, so you have a bunch of half-completed goals rather than completed goals.
- Identity Expansion Bias: You want to become multiple versions of yourself at once, but then no one can identify who you really are, and eventually you lose opportunities because people don’t remember complex things.
Less is more! At this level, what you need to notice is not about adding goals, but about filtering goals. When everything is working, your biggest risk is not failure, it’s dilution. Time and energy is limited resources, and most of time, life provide you just enough to complete one goal – the one that give you identity
9. You don’t collaborate
Teamwork ? . No, it is not mandatory here.
People often use collaboration and teamwork as if they’re the same. They overlap—but they solve different problems.
Teamwork is about shared execution. Teamwork is about working as a unit toward a shared outcome. Roles are defined, responsibility is distributed, success or failure is collective. No single person owns everything. The team does, and team members might be changed.
Collaboration is combining strengths. Collaboration is about bringing different people with different skills together to have solve a problem. You still stay responsible for your goal. You only involve others when it adds value, aka solve what you can’t. It’s flexible method and often temporary. You can hire, or consult, many experts in short term to help you overcome somethings out of your expertise. For example, when building a software, you can hire a designer in a few months for a final UI design instead of draw yourself. Or when you’re writing, you can have some friends reviews and challenges your ideas. You’re still the owner. Others enhance your work. And don’t forget to pay them, or help them back!
If you’ve already chosen one goal, you don’t necessarily need a full team. What you likely need is targeted collaboration. Jumping straight into teamwork can actually slow you down because teamwork might require more coordination, more dependencies, less flexibility. Stay owner, but don’t stay isolated.
The Tech Lead 