# How to Know When to Give Up on Goals

An episode of [SOLVED with Mark Manson](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1247526593), 26 Jun 2024, 42 min.

Audio: https://claritaspod.com/measure/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/441/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/episode.flightcast.com/owmj1wlr4h5mrkktpanqkf47.mp3

A lot of people treat goals like some kind of sacred self-improvement law, where the most important thing you can do is set and achieve your goals. But goals are simply tools we use to point us in the right direction. Your goals should serve you—and so you shouldn’t be a slave to some arbitrary goal you set when it’s no longer serving you. So how do you know when a goal is no longer pushing you in the right direction? In this episode, I talk about why I gave up a pretty big goal I set at the beginning of the year. I discuss what I think are the criteria you should use when deciding whether to give up on a goal or stick it out. We also discuss what we learned from the goals survey we did for podcast viewers and listeners. How many stuck with their goals and how many have moved on? What are the most effective tactics people used to stick to their goals? What are the most important lessons they learned about their goals and themselves? Check it out. CHAPTERS Chapters • 00:00:00 Introduction • 00:01:13 Mark's (failed) goal • 00:05:11 Is Mark full of sh*t? • 00:08:14 Drew's (half sucessful) goal • 00:12:08 Extreme measures • 00:14:08 Getting more specific with your goals • 00:16:40 Survey results • 00:18:55 Teachable moment: Selection bias • 00:23:06 How did people stick with their goals? • 00:24:49 The value of self-discovery in working towards goals • 00:32:57 3 good reasons to give up on a goal • 00:37:00 Bonus reason to give up a goal • 00:39:34 Mark's new health goals • 00:41:53 Drew's updated goals ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://markmanson.net/breakthrough ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://bit.ly/4w46FMH FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

## Transcript

[0:01] The podcast that's saving the world, one fewer fuck at a time. It's the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast, with your host, Mark Manson.
[0:13] So as listeners and viewers probably remember, we started the year, you and I talked about our goals for the year, and then we asked the podcast audience to submit their goals for the year. And we promised that halfway through the year, we were going to follow up ourselves and follow up with the audience to determine how disciplined...
[0:32] is the Mark Manson audience or how bad are we fucking up? And so this is what we're here to discover today. We've sent out the survey. We've heard from the audience. Drew and I have our goals. We know how far we've gotten with our goals or haven't gotten with our goals. And so today's podcast episode is it's a return to goals and a discussion of when does it make sense to give up a goal? Because there are many circumstances that it makes sense to give up a goal.
[0:58] And when you should just shut the fuck up and grit through it. And we're going to try to figure that out today. So I don't know. Where should we start? Let's start with our goals. Okay. And then we can move on to responses that we got from everybody. We got some good responses. We got a lot of a big response from the audience. So let's start with ours and then we'll get into that. Okay. Should I go first? Let's let's let's hear yours. What happened? Let's start with the failure. Let's kick this off. It's going to make me look a lot better. Let's kick this off with an abject failure. It's.
[1:24] What happened? Okay. So to refresh everybody or anybody who didn't listen to that episode, my goal for the year was to run a marathon. I turned 40 this year. I really got into running last year. I was like, you know what? You know what's a great 40-year-old goal? There was a marathon on my birthday. I was like, this is perfect. Let's do a marathon.
[1:43] So I started training for a marathon actually in November. And then we did that podcast end of last year, came out first week of January, made it very public that I was going to go on a marathon. And actually, the only marathon I ran on my birthday was a marathon of tacos in Mexico. There's no way around it. I didn't achieve the goal. I gave it up probably early February, late January, early February, maybe five weeks out. Oh, was it that early? Okay. Yeah, it was maybe five weeks out. Yeah. Yeah.
[2:11] But I feel good about giving it up. So I want to use myself as a case study of an audience. I mean, Drew, keep me honest. If it sounds like I'm bullshitting myself, please tell me. Because this is the tricky thing about giving up goals is like you sound reasonable to yourself. Like we all we all find reasons to justify not sticking with them. But, you know, sometimes we're full of shit and sometimes we are being reasonable. I believe.
[2:34] personally think I'm being reasonable. So here's what happened. There are two things that I discovered. So initially I started training for the marathon, really enjoyed it. It was going very, very well. Once I worked up to around 10 to 12 miles, two things happened. One is started really disliking it. Just a lot of pain, which I've since learned from people who have done a lot of
[2:59] that probably stemmed from training too quickly, like pushing myself too quickly, which is something that we talked about back in January of having unrealistic expectations of what is achievable in a certain amount of time. So you could chalk up, that could be part of the failure is that I...
[3:15] I overestimated how much I was capable of achieving in just three or four months. So once I got into double-digit mileage, body started to really hurt. Recovery became very difficult. Just felt like my energy was sapped all the time. Had started having trouble getting out of bed. Second thing that I didn't account for, I didn't realize, was the time commitment. Like, you see these training regimens of like, oh, okay, you're going to run six miles on Tuesday and four miles on Wednesday and...
[3:43] three miles on Friday and then 12 miles on Saturday. Like you look at that and you're like, okay, well, that's a cool challenge. Well, you don't realize that's like six hours of running. And then when you add in prep, warmup, stretching, recovery, everything afterwards, like you're dedicating like 10 to 15 hours a week just to training. And we're in a place in the business, like we're growing, we're scaling, I'm working a lot.
[4:11] I have a lot of business-related goals that are higher priority. And so being off in the mountains running for 12 hours a week and then being exhausted like another 30 to 40 hours a week, I just started to realize that it was incompatible with other goals in my life, with a lot of the professional goals and career goals that I have this year.
[4:32] and it kind of forced me into a situation of like, does this even make sense? I'm exhausting myself doing something I don't enjoy and actively harming things that are more important to me. You know, is like running this arbitrary distance really that important? Like, is it making my life better? Is it making me happier? I came to the conclusion, no, it's not. That there are plenty of ways that I can maintain my health and get in great shape that don't involve
[4:58] suffering a dozen hours a week and interfering with all sorts of work goals and life goals, and not to mention spending free time with my wife. So I dropped it, and I felt good about it, and I still feel good about it. I have zero regrets about it. Tell me, am I full of shit? No, that actually doesn't sound like you're bullshitting yourself or anybody else. It
[5:21] I thought this thing was the most important thing at this time in my life. And it turns out it wasn't. I mean, I think that's a very, that's kind of one of the criteria you should use. Is it really that important to you? And I think a lot of people, when they get into these goals, and I think we'll talk about this later too, they find out that like, oh, I didn't, this actually isn't that important to me. I thought it was. Your health is very important to you. Yes. Right. But like this one, like you said, this one arbitrary goal of a distance run on a certain date, is that really that important compared to all the other things that are going on in your life?
[5:50] I think you raise a good point there of like prioritization because there was a period a couple years ago. So when I was really overweight and much, much more unhealthy, I was like,
[6:02] There was a part of my fitness journey that I realized I had to make it the top priority in my life. One of the reasons I got so out of shape earlier in my life is because I always prioritized work and social life over health. And so I had a period for a couple of years where I had to prioritize health over work.
[6:21] in social life, there is a context where that makes sense. If I was, let's say I was like 60 pounds overweight, horribly out of shape. I mean, maybe not a marathon, but maybe making health this year, the top priority, maybe that makes sense. But for where I am in my life, I'm pretty satisfied where I am health wise. I don't feel like I need to, I have no desire to be
[6:43] a bodybuilder or anything like that. Like, I just want to be healthy. And actually the area of my life that I have extremely ambitious goals is not health. It's, it's actually more work related. So to me, it makes sense to keep that as the top priority, uh, at this point in my life. So I still have fitness goals. I have new fitness goals. We'll talk about them later. I think they're more reasonable fitness goals. They're probably more appropriate fitness goals. And
[7:07] But I think this is the thing that gets missed. I think there's way too much emphasis put on what is the goal and did you achieve it or not? I think those two things, it's actually less important than what the process teaches you. So setting the marathon goal, it taught me a lot about what matters to me, what is actually important at this point in my life.
[7:28] And by letting it go, I was able to replace it with actually a better goal for me, a goal that makes more sense for my current lifestyle and makes more sense for my current fitness goals. And it's basically just going to make me like a happier and healthier person overall. So ultimately, it's like the goals should be used as tools.
[7:47] to advance you towards behaviors that are closer to your values. And what people lose track of is that if you set the wrong goal or the goal isn't completely accurate, then it can lead you down a path of behavior that actually takes you away from what you value in your life. And so you have to be very, very observant of when that starts happening and then stop yourself and be like, okay, this is a bad goal. I should drop it and replace it with something else.
[8:14] So I'm curious, your goal was to sleep better this year. I'm curious, A, what sort of progress you've made, and B, did you decide that that was a waste of time and have you replaced it with a more important goal like bench pressing 300 pounds or something?
[8:30] Well, yeah, no. The thing is about sleep is that it's not, it's not really a goal I can ignore. It's never going to go away. It's never going to go away. So, I mean, yeah, I could give up on like trying to get better at it, but it's like, it's just never going to go away. So it's constantly there with me. So I have gotten better. I've had, it's fits and starts. Okay. The thing is, is that now that I've been more, I've paid more attention to it,
[8:53] And I know kind of like what makes me get better or worse sleep. And I've had stints where I've had really good sleep over the last few months. I am even more aware of when I don't get good sleep and it's worse when I don't get good sleep. So let's start with specifically what have you done? What are the measures that you've taken?
[9:09] I did cut back on my caffeine. A lot of people were very concerned. My caffeine intake. Because it was brutal. Like I said, five or six cups, I think, is what I usually drink. I've now capped it at three cups a day. I usually only do two, but a hard cap at three. Okay. I think the caffeine, that didn't help a whole lot. I think if that's going to help, I need to just cut it out completely. Yeah. Which I'm not quite there yet.
[9:29] The screens, especially later at night, I had a very strong suspicion that that was a big impediment to my sleep. And it turns out it was. I've capped that at 10 p.m. I tried to do 9 p.m. and didn't really see much of a difference, I don't think. So 10 p.m., no screens after that. That seems to help quite a bit if I...
[9:47] have screens open later than that, it definitely fucks with my sleep. Interesting, okay. I've gotten way better at regular exercise as well. Surprisingly, that doesn't seem to matter for my sleep. Yeah, whether I get a good workout, a bad workout, any workout, no workout, it doesn't really seem to affect my sleep.
[10:02] You know what's funny, and I've noticed this with fitness goals over the last year, sometimes if a workout's particularly really intense or strenuous, I actually get worse sleep. Yeah. And later in the day, too, if I do it later in the day, like an intense workout later in the day. A light workout later in the day is fine, but yeah.
[10:18] I've also kind of, I did some tracking too. I've never been huge on tracking, but with, you know, your stories about your tracking and how it's helped you and a lot of other people too, I did some kind of just basic tracking, not super detailed or anything like that. That's helped a little bit too. And I can see that I have incrementally gotten better. Like I plotted my sleep time actually on a, on a graph and stuff like that. And there is a, there's a slight upslope on how much sleep I've been getting. What was your kind of average per night at the beginning of the year? And then what, what roughly where is it at now?
[10:47] Yeah. So the way I track, it's a proxy. It's not a- Is it like a score? Yeah, basically a score. So what score were you kind of at when you started? So I was usually getting in like the 60 to 70 out of 100 range before. And now I'm like consistently in the 70s and hitting in the 80s. Nice. Which is, yeah, it's incrementally better. Really what I would like to get is like 90 and above. Yeah. And kind of consistently get there, you know, at least like five nights out of a week or whatever. For that, I think I'm going to have to-
[11:14] do some more drastic things one thing i started experimenting with too was like the light exposure early morning stuff and then getting a little bit at night that was sporadic i think for the rest of the year i'd really like to get into that and really uh even do like a sunlight protocol of some kind or something like that i think that would that would help me quite a bit because i did notice that that it helps at least reset my clock yeah if i get some good morning sunlight i've like got good energy for the rest of the day
[11:39] yeah so i think that i'm pretty sensitive to that and i think that's why screens me up so much too where have your struggles been like where have you up screen time sometimes i'd like to just veg out at night yeah like throw a screen in front of my face and watch dumb tv i watched all of rick and morty oh so it's so good it's like i binged through that and a lot of times i was doing it late at night i was like okay i gotta shut this up yeah and that's another thing it's just we know what we need to do and we don't do it yeah even with these goals and i don't know what that's about still i don't know what that is for me just yet
[12:08] I had a friend who was completely addicted to his phone, social media, everything, especially at night. It was causing a lot of problems. And he did something crazy, which I really admire, which is, so you can buy these plugs that have a timer on them. Yeah. And you preset when they turn on and off. He put those plugs all around the house, and then he set a password on them that he didn't have access to. I think he gave it to his wife or something. Yeah.
[12:31] But basically the router that was plugged into that the wifi went through was set up with one of these plugs and the plug shut off at 9 p.m. So it's all the internet in the house went off at 9 p.m. All the TVs went off at 9 p.m. And there was like no way for him to, unless he like goes and like crawls under the console and like unplugs everything and replugs it in. It's basically like child protecting yourself. I do think stuff like that is underrated. I used to hear that stuff and I'm like, that's ridiculous. Like that's so over the top.
[13:00] But it is funny. Like, we really are creatures of our environment. And so much of our behavior is influenced by incentive and availability. And, yeah, if you just control the availability of something. Environment matters. It matters a ton. Yeah. It's huge. Yeah.
[13:17] what i noticed though too is that that like the the environment and also like external pressures for whatever reason they work really well for me yeah um so like just doing this podcast yeah setting that up setting that up for me that puts the pressure on me that i need i think everybody's kind of different around that but there's so much around like oh like you should only be doing your goals for intrinsic why values right and like really doing stuff like that i'm like
[13:42] ah, you should set up your environment and make there be external consequences to your behavior. I mean, social pressure is a real thing and it's never going to go away. And you might as well leverage it for your advantage. You're never going to stop caring what people think. And so if you go tell all your friends, hey, I'm going to quit smoking. And then a week later, you light up a cigarette in front of them. That's embarrassing. So you should be conscious of how you're using that to your advantage. Right.
[14:08] What else? What else are you any plans going forward or? I realized I need to get a little more specific. I was just like, get better sleep. Right. How do you measure that? Yeah. And so I realized that through the tracking. I'm like, oh, I don't know. And a lot of people reported that tracking has been the most beneficial thing for them and valuable thing. It's a classic business principle, right? Like you you improve what you measure.
[14:29] So, yeah, I think getting more specific and, like I said, get my scores, if I can get those more in the 80s and 90s more consistently, I think that's a good tangible goal that I can see in front of my face. Yeah. That would help me a lot. And you were saying that now that you do, you have experienced some good nights of sleep, when you don't get one, you're just like, fuck me. Like, I see the extremes now and I see, like, man, if I don't get a minimum of six hours, I am just useless. Yeah.
[14:57] And it's this vicious cycle too, where it's like, I got something, I got a lot to do tomorrow and stuff like that. And I started getting in my own head and I don't sleep well. And then all that stuff I need to do now, I'm doing it very shittily or something like that. Snowballs. Yeah. Sometimes I think part of it's getting older, but yeah, if I don't get six hours, I mean, I might as well just like call the day off. I might as well just call and say, because it's, it's even if I do brute force my way through the day, I'm going to do such a poor job at everything. Yeah.
[15:22] Yeah. It's kind of like, what's the point? All right. So let's get into the survey stuff. We asked you guys to send us your goals at the beginning of the year. We had 14, was it 1,400 people sending their goals? Almost 1,400, yeah. 1,400 people sending their goals. Then we sent out a survey last week asking people to report on how they've been doing. Here are the results. Drum roll.
[15:44] Yeah, well, if we start off with the goals you all did submit, again, about 1,400 people submitted something and we had you write out, you know, what's your goal and everything like that. And I kind of just did a brief summary of them. They're around a lot of the things you would expect. A lot of them like career and professional development, people, you know, either trying to get a raise or get a new job. What was the most common one?
[16:02] Most common was fitness and health. Okay. Losing weight or running a marathon or stuff like that. Most common was around that. Next one was like career stuff. Yeah. Getting financial stuff in order too. That was a common thing. Saving money, getting a raise. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of the common ones, which is not surprising, but also like, yeah, that's what you would expect because people kind of all want the same things.
[16:24] But yeah, so things like changing careers, starting a side hustle, that was really common. Or just like improving skills. Like a lot of people wanted to teach themselves a new coding language or design program or something like that. Mental health was a big one, though, too. Interesting. People, you know, they're like, I need to do some things to really improve my mental health here. Whether that was just like taking more time to themselves or taking more time off work or self-care stuff, that kind of stuff, you know. Okay.
[16:48] Learning and education too. We got a very learning hungry crowd, which doesn't surprise me at all. Yeah. Some people are doing some kind of cool stuff. One guy was, he wanted to learn machine learning and AI by taking NVIDIA's. Oh, cool. They have this like course that he wanted to take. And I was like, that's a pretty cool thing to do. Yeah. Yeah.
[17:04] But then like cool personal projects too. It always surprises me like the audience we have, you guys are always working on cool, really cool stuff. Like somebody was working on a graphic novel, which is really cool. Writing a book on their philosophical theory, developing a sports trading app. Like there was just really cool stuff. People were like, you're aiming high and that's awesome.
[17:23] In terms of results, about 80% of people said they have stuck with their goals, which is pretty good. Really good. 20% say now I've given up on that. What are the exact numbers on that? Exact numbers. So 78.1% said they stuck with it. Yeah. How many people responded to this survey? About 300. 300. Okay. Teaching moment. Okay.
[17:43] Teaching moment. All right. This is actually really good. I'm glad. Statistics lesson. What are we doing? I'm glad this happened because, well, this is important because, and I think this is important for the audience to hear because there's a lot of podcasts out there, a lot of journalists out there that you will see things like headline, you know, new study finds that 80% of people stick to their goals in June, you know, and it's.
[18:07] Everybody's like, oh my God, that's so much higher than I would have expected, blah, blah, blah. And guys, I cannot tell you how many times if you actually go look at the survey data, there's some things that stand, if you know what to look for, a few things stand out. So we mentioned just a few minutes ago, 1,400 people responded in January with their goals. We sent out a survey last week, 300 people responded. Yeah.
[18:30] that's 20, 25% of the original people. So that's actually, most people didn't respond to our survey. Now, if you did not stick with your goal, do you think you're more likely or less likely to respond to the survey? If you did stick to your goal, do you think you're more likely or less likely? So it's like, what we're probably doing is most of the people who stuck to the goal probably responded.
[18:52] I would guess. Yes. We don't know for sure. But my guess is that there's going to be, this is what's called selection bias in research. And this is why a lot of survey research is flawed is because it's the way the survey is constructed, it filters who's going to actually respond to the survey, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In this case, it was unintentional because we asked everybody. But there's probably a lot of people out there who didn't stick with their goal.
[19:17] They feel kind of bad about it, and they definitely don't want to tell us. Right. So they don't fill it out. Right. Whereas there's probably a lot of people who did stick with their goal, and they're feeling really good about it. And they're like, oh, I can't wait to tell Mark and Drew about sticking with my goal. So this 80% or the 78% or whatever, it's probably very skewed.
[19:35] and there's definitely a selection bias flaw in this survey. So I want to just put that in front of the audience. The next time you see a big headline saying, survey says or research says that social media makes everybody miserable, it's like, okay, well, go look at the sample size, look at how they ran the survey, and I'd say at least 50% of the time, there are fundamental issues with the survey itself. 100%.
[20:00] Yeah, this is not scientific. No, no, no. But I like to bring this up as frequently, because this is a huge problem in our industry. There are a huge problem. There's a lot of podcasts out there that will parrot shit like this. There are a lot of podcasts out there that would get this result and be like, 80% of our audience sticks with their goals. Check out the Mark Manson podcast. His audience is crushing it, right? And it's like, no, not really. It's not a representative sample. It's got extreme selection bias. There's...
[20:29] There's probably issues you could find with phrasing of questions and stuff. So I just want to put that out there. I think it's really important to point that out. It's a huge problem in the industry. I know people who listen to this podcast probably listen to a lot of other podcasts in the space or read a lot of other people in the space. There are some people in the space who are very aware of these sorts of things, and they know how to filter for them. There are a lot of people in the space who don't know a fucking thing about this and will just repeat whatever statistic they find that sounds interesting. So be wary.
[20:59] Okay. Off my soapbox. For sure. I mean, it is a good point though, because we tried to mitigate that a little bit too, because in the email we sent out asking for responses, you know, you said, Hey, I gave up on my goal. So it's okay if you did too. I just want to know. Yeah. Right. So we tried to mitigate that a little bit, but obviously there's still, you know, some shame attached to that for some people I'm sure and whatever, but it's also just a simple, like,
[21:22] It's less exciting to fill out a survey about a goal that you gave up three months ago. Yeah. No, for sure. For sure. And I totally get that. You know, that said, though, too, of the people who said they gave up on their goals, 60% said they didn't regret it. Yeah. So, you know. Which is also interesting because I imagine that's probably skewed as well. Yeah.
[21:39] Definitely. Like, I don't... I don't regret it. I can't wait to tell them about how I don't regret it. You know, there's probably a large number of people who gave up on it and feel bad about it that we're not hearing from, I would assume. Well, okay. That said, good job. No, seriously. Way to go, team. 80%. There was some good stuff in here. There was some good kind of qualitative data. Let's hear... Yeah. Let's hear from the people who stuck with it first.
[22:04] Yeah. So the people who stuck with it, we asked them, like, what did you do? Like, do you use any of these tactics? We kind of give them a menu of tactics that and what did you do to help you achieve this goal? About 55, 56 percent said productivity or other inspirational content. So they're watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts like these or whatever. The next highest one that was tracking almost half the people said they use tracking. Wow. And some of the comments later we'll discuss. That was a big one, like I mentioned earlier.
[22:29] Uh, journaling about 35% of people use journaling to 25% use accountability partners. Nice. 15% were using coaching of some kind, which is kind of cool. And then one interesting one I found, um, about 18% of people said that, uh, this is the whole of the whole survey. This is everybody said that they didn't use any, any sort of tactic or anything like that.
[22:49] Wow. So. Just brute force. Just brute force. Just one guy said, pure fucking determination. That was his other. Good old willpower. I found it kind of interesting too. Again, this is not scientific and it's biased data, but about 20% of the people who gave up
[23:05] on their goals said they didn't use anything while only about 10% of people who stuck with it said they didn't use anything. So people who were using some sort of system of some kind seemed to do a little bit clearly helped. Yeah. It helped them. Yeah. Which I found was pretty interesting. We had them to fill out like, what did you, what was the most valuable thing you learned out of all of this? And a lot of, again, the traffic tracking people didn't realize how valuable a lot of people were like, that actually helped me a lot.
[23:28] Yeah. And that's just something simple, a checkbox every day or whatever it is. And for me too, again, the tracking really helped me quite a bit. You already mentioned this a little bit too, you alluded to this, but the self-discovery that people experienced as a result of setting, just setting the goal. And I think that's another underrated thing about goals that people don't, yeah. So, you know, whether you achieve it or not kind of doesn't matter. It's what you learn about yourself along the way. Yeah.
[23:53] People repeatedly, people were like, this was definitely like an eye-opening self-discovery. And I think that's one of the most, if not the most valuable things about setting goals. And it's funny because that discovery, it can go different. Like I've always had this weird fetish, I think, that a lot of people have for just like really deep.
[24:15] grueling, challenging, painful things or deals. It's like the guys who run do Ironmans and climb Everest and all this shit. I've always had this kind of sick fascination with it and romanticized it to a certain extent. And
[24:33] My whole life, I've always kind of fantasized of doing something like that, accomplishing something like that. But it's one of those things that I discovered about myself that it's like when I'm actually out doing it, it feels completely meaningless and purposeless. I'm like, what am I doing out here? Like, why am I here? Yeah, yeah.
[24:52] But I know there's a lot of people that find a great amount of meaning and significance in it. But it's like that happens all throughout our life. Like there's something when we're on the outside of something, we look in and it seems very meaningful and like it's going to enrich our lives in a bunch of ways. And then we actually get in and start doing it. And you're like, oh.
[25:11] No, no, no. It's not the thing I thought it was. Maybe I should find the next thing. And then sometimes it works the other way. Sometimes from the outside, something seems completely pointless and like, why would you ever do that? And then you go do it and you're like, oh, this is amazing. I can't believe I waited so long to do this. Yeah. Like you look at people who are like ultra runners or something like that. And you look like me. I look at them. Why do you? Why? Yeah. That's just why. And then you talk to these people and it's like, oh, they're all in on this. And there's like a life around it.
[25:36] There's all sorts of things like that that function that way. And it's not just physical activities. It's creative activities. One of the examples I use frequently is that I used to want to be a musician because my conception of what a musician was was getting to perform to audiences. And then once I actually got into it, what I realized is that 95% of your time as a musician is spent either practicing or dealing with like...
[26:03] rehearsals and logistics and bullshit. So you need to love practicing and rehearsing. Those are the people that become musicians. The performance is just the cherry on top.
[26:14] Yeah. And then one other thing I'll mention too, which kind of stems from a lot of that, people often cited to the value of being flexible and adaptable. And I think you've talked about this a lot, but I don't know if you've ever specifically addressed it, but life happens, right? There were some people who were like, they had this workout goal and they got injured or a family emergency type of situation came up that they had to deal with over a longer period of time.
[26:40] And I think a lot of people just had an appreciation for like, I don't control nearly as much as I think I do. And that's okay. What are you talking about, Drew? You fucking skipped that funeral. You get that running. Yeah, right. Right. Exactly. Shit like that. Right. Obviously you need to be adaptable, but I think people were just like, oh, life is still going on. The world's not stopping for my goals. Yeah.
[27:00] It's funny because I know I've said this on the last podcast too. I think the goals get oversold. The goal itself is not the point. The point is it gets you off your ass in doing something that teaches you something. That's what's meaningful. The goal itself is usually completely arbitrary. And I'd say nine times out of 10 isn't actually the thing that is rewarding.
[27:22] But occasionally it is. Occasionally you do have a goal, and it is actually the thing that makes you really happy, and it is very rewarding. That does happen. But I think that's a minority of the time. That's the exception. The majority of the time, the goal is just kind of this arbitrary thing for you to aim at.
[27:37] And it just gets you off the couch, gets you out in the world, gets you working on yourself, learning, growing, doing different things. And it rarely works out the way you expect it to. Often, my experience is that most goals, even when I hit them, it's a mixed bag. It's like, okay, well, that was worthwhile. Like when I was losing weight, you know, I had a lot of weight loss goals. And...
[28:00] As I hit them, there was never this like, oh my God, 30 pounds. It was always this mixed bag of like, okay, well, that was really hard. And I discovered that I have this kind of fucked up relationship with food. And I realized that my social life is probably contributing a lot to my health issues. So I'm going to have to re-examine my social life. And it just became this very bittersweet thing of like, okay, well, I hit the goal. But that actually seems like the least important thing that's going on right now because...
[28:28] the path to get to the goal raised all these other issues and made me aware of all these other things happening in my life that now I need to address those and think about those. There was quite a bit of that in the responses. People were like, I was gonna try to get healthy, but actually I realized that I smoke too much weed, you know, or whatever it is, or I need to quit smoking first, you know, or something like that. I'd say too, one thing I've learned from this, I actually don't set a ton of goals, and I realized this is another self-discovery thing I figured out.
[28:57] I don't set a ton of goals and it's because I'm a perfectionist and I'm just afraid of failure. Why set yourself up for failure so starkly like that? What I found though through all of this is, and listening to you talk about this has been more like, it's fine. It's okay if you don't hit that goal. And so for me, that's just been like, okay, it's okay. You can change your goals. Yeah.
[29:18] give them up. You can find new ones. You and I are opposite in that regard. And it's, I mean, I don't have to tell you, how many goals have I set within the business over the last 10 years? Like hundreds. How many have I completely abandoned after like two months? 90% of them. Yeah, exactly. Like it's, they get you oriented in a certain direction. And I mean, it's the same within business as well. You're like,
[29:43] oh, we're going to drive revenue up 25% on this product line this year. And then you get three months in and you're like, oh, actually pushing revenue over here is like creating a bad trade-off over here. And actually we should be focusing on this because that's a better long-term opportunity. Okay, well, fuck that goal. And it's like that goal is basically gone. But you needed to have that goal to figure out that that trade-off was bad
[30:05] so you could reorient the strategy. They're stepping stones. Right. They're stepping stones. And whether you actually hit the goal or not is far less important than what the process teaches you. I guess that's the moral of the story. For sure.
[30:16] Okay, so before we get into your updated goals, maybe what we're going to do for the rest of the year, do you have kind of, can we sum that all up a little bit and just give people like, maybe a couple of rules of thumb. Obviously there's no real algorithm for when to give up on a goal or when to stick with it or anything like that. But do you have kind of, you mentioned a couple of them I think already. Can we kind of tie this up a little bit? So the principle is that,
[30:37] your goal should be moving you towards your values. And the moment that they stop, they start moving you away from your values, that's when it's time to give it up. And I think another time to give it up is when you realize that to achieve one goal, you actually need to go back. Like the smoking example is a great example. Like sometimes what you realize is to achieve one goal, you actually need to go back and set another goal first. So that's another example of putting something on the back burner.
[31:05] Also, the realistic thing, it is very hard. We're human. We suck at predicting the future. We suck at having a realistic sense of what's possible to accomplish in three months or six months or a year. We tend to overestimate or underestimate what is possible. And so the realism is part of it as well. Oftentimes, you'll set a goal. It seems like a good goal, but it's actually probably unrealistic. Even if I wasn't having the trade-off time at work to do the marathon goal, let's say I had tons of free time.
[31:34] and I had the time to just fucking spend every day of my life running. I probably could have powered my way through the marathon, but a couple of the people I know who do a lot of endurance stuff, they told me they're like, very good chance you would have gotten injured just given the rate that I was trying to push myself and lack of experience and everything. So even if that trade-off hadn't existed,
[32:00] It might have been an unrealistic goal. But again, sometimes you don't know if it's unrealistic until you start. Sometimes you have to get a month in and be like, oh, this is fucking impossible. Let me change the goal now. Let me move the goalpost back and be a little bit more realistic about it. So I think those are three principles that people can kind of follow, engage to know when a goal is worth dropping. Right, yeah.
[32:25] I think there's some research on when goals do turn bad or toxic or whatever. And the findings are definitely in line with that. A lot of times they've done this really at the organization level more than anything. Like organizational psychologists study this a lot. And one of the things they find is that when you set goals, and I think we're very aware of this when we do this in the business anyway.
[32:47] when you set goals, it often incentivizes people to, for bad behavior of some kind. And this can happen on an individual level too. Like if you're like, I set a goal to make this much money, then you go out and you start screwing people over or something like that. Right. And while you hit your goal of making money, right. It goes back to the values thing. Yes. It's funny. I noticed I did a, I did a CrossFit workout last weekend for the first time in like three or four years. And, uh,
[33:12] I actually thought about this because when I'm working out alone, like let's say I'm doing an extra, I'm doing like squats, like three sets of 10 or something. When I'm by myself, I count every rep. Yeah. You know, I'm like, I don't overestimate, like I don't fudge one. You know, it's like, did I hit 10? No, I got nine. Okay, write down nine. Yeah.
[33:31] It was funny, I went to the CrossFit gym, and as you know, a lot of CrossFit gyms, they put you in teams, and they set time limits, and they give you like, all right, you gotta do 50 burpees in this amount of time and all this stuff. And so I started doing this workout, and I started fudging reps. I'm like, you know, that kind of counted. I'm like, okay, well, I'm supposed to do 50. I'm at 40. That's close enough. Let's move on to the next one. I found myself, I'm like, start cheating. As you were saying that, because I've seen that research too, that an overemphasis on goals
[34:00] actually makes people less ethical. Yeah. And it reminded me of that, of like, I remember sitting there going through this workout at this CrossFit gym. I'm like, I have not cheated on reps like in five years, but suddenly I'm surrounded by all these other dudes who I'm like competing with. And now I'm like, okay, I'm going to fudge on this one. You know?
[34:17] It's just funny. It's human nature. Yeah. I thought of another one, another circumstance that you should give up a goal. If you feel like you've already learned what you wanted to learn, this is more for probably like an educational goal. But sometimes people will set a goal of like, oh, I want to get this certification this year or I want to read 10 philosophy books this year or whatever. And then you read five and you're like, you know, I kind of feel like I know everything I want to know. I don't feel like I'm getting anything more out of book number six or seven.
[34:47] then just drop it. Like if you feel satisfied, you should never feel like you're just suffering to hit an arbitrary number. Anytime you feel like you're making yourself suffer to hit an arbitrary number that people just made up out of thin air, that's dumb. You should stop. Like everything should have a purpose behind it. Every goal should have a purpose behind it. And as soon as that purpose disappears or is no longer clear or is misaligned with what you actually care about, then...
[35:15] Drop the goal. Nobody's keeping score. Nobody's going to judge you. Nobody cares. Yeah. Yeah. I had a goal one year. It was to read a book a week. I think I made it almost three months in. And I quickly came to that. I was like, what? What am I doing? Yeah. Yeah. And I was powering through books that I was like. Yeah.
[35:32] like only 100 pages left yeah like the cheating on the reps thing like do you give it up or do you keep going through like yeah it's like nobody's nobody cares nobody's keeping score there's like one person was like how are you even doing that and i'm like i sit down and i read yeah otherwise there's nobody nobody cared yeah was all that suffering worth that one comment probably not was not no
[35:55] Okay, cool. So you've given up on your hopes and dreams to run a marathon. For now. I mean, I might do one one day. But so what I realize now is that it's much more of two things. One is I would have to ramp into the training slower. Yeah. And two is it's more of a time commitment than I realized. Okay. And so for me to do it again, I would basically give myself more time to ramp up training. And then I would make sure that I don't have other stuff going on in my life that I prioritize higher.
[36:22] But you do have new health goals. Yes. This is another reason I don't think you're completely bullshitting yourself is that you've set new goals in the same domain. Yes. Because you still prioritize your health. One of the problems I've had in the past is I'll set a goal and then I give up on it and I'll set a completely different goal in a completely another area of my life just like bouncing around. Sure. Like not really giving any thought to it, not being very intentional about it. So I think that you're not completely bullshitting us because you've still got...
[36:50] You still got that. Pass the Drew Bernie test. Caveat that you paid me to say that. But still, what are your new health goals? So I should say, slightly related to that, I do like to set domain specific. Like, I feel like I should always have a health goal. I should always have a business or professional goal. And then I should always have, like, some sort of personal goal. So, yeah, my new health goal. What I realized, I basically, I've been on this four or five year...
[37:13] health journey most of that involves weight loss i'm pretty thin now pretty skinny i'd like to get stronger especially like now that i'm 40 i've been doing a lot of reading on longevity long-term health lifting's great and it's basically yeah it's like it build up as much muscle mass as you can while you still can because that's what's gonna kind of carry you in the old age and
[37:33] Helps with your skeleton a lot, with your bones. Yeah. So I'm taking, I realized that, okay, probably the next step is to try to add some lean mass and get stronger. So I have goals in all three of the main major lifts, squat, deadlift, bench press. And so I'm working towards those this year. PRs in all three, hopefully this year.
[37:53] I'm not going to, but I want to ask you what you bench, bro. I'm not very strong. I'm not very strong. I'm not very strong. I want to... They're pretty simple numbers. So I want to be able to deadlift 300 pounds for five reps, one set of five reps, squat 250, one set of five reps, and then bench 200, one set of five reps. And I'm like, right now I'm probably like 260, 215, 220, and then like 175, 180. Okay. Okay.
[38:21] So I'm like, it's possible. It's doable. And what are you doing? You're on a regular workout schedule and everything? Regular workout. Yeah, regular workout. I've up protein, eating at a slight surplus. So I've actually gained a little bit of weight the last couple months. Travel has honestly been the biggest challenge with that. Traveling a lot for the YouTube channel. And yeah, that's the biggest challenge. So staying consistent with those workouts.
[38:51] It used to be I was always very consistent with exercise and my diet was terrible. Now it's kind of the other way around. I feel I can kind of keep my diet in line without too much trouble, but hitting three to four workouts a week consistently.
[39:07] It's been tough. Yeah, especially with your schedule. And again, the travel thing, that just- It wrecks everything. Yeah, it does. Everything, it does. What about you? Well, yeah, so- How do we get you to sleep perfection? I really do. I want to do more of the light protocol, like sunlight protocols-
[39:22] try that out um and some of the things i've already already mentioned just to kind of double down on those i think i need to get a little bit better with the tracking too i've been using kind of crude rough uh ways to do that i don't like wearables really especially when i'm sleeping so that makes it a little um tougher but i have now that i've seen the light and the value and the tracking i think i want to get a little bit more specific with that tracking is fucking it's it's magic
[39:47] It's game changing. It's the simplest stuff to a checklist or whatever. It's so dumb. Check every day. It's so dumb, but it is. It makes such a difference. I'm really happy to see that people are seeing that across the board. Tracking is what changed my wife's sleeping. Yeah, it was. It was the big unlock for her. And then with me with diet, it was probably the single bit. It and quitting alcohol were like the two biggest unlocks for me. Fixing my nutrition was tracking and not drinking. Right.
[40:14] Yeah, so I think by the end of the year, if I can hit those scores of in the 80s or above, say, four nights a week, I was thinking about, that would be about more than half the time. Okay. I think that's a good goal to start with. I think it's realistic, and it's definitely achievable for me, but it would also be a little bit of work to get there. And is the biggest thing the screens? Is there something else you can do?
[40:34] I think it's, I mean, sort of. Ketamine, maybe. Yeah, yeah. Sort of just like sedating myself. The big one, I think my ultimate boss, and it just, I don't know, I can't. Caffeine. I have kicked so many bad habits in my life. Caffeine, for whatever reason, is just, I can't do it.
[40:52] Yeah. I've tried before, but I think I can get there eventually. I'm just not sure if that's one I'm going to let go just yet. I did about six months without caffeine in 2019, 2020. Fucking sucked. Yeah. It's a life not worth living. I haven't made it more than a day.
[41:08] so i haven't i i quit just because my wife gave me so much shit and i like did it to like prove that i could and then i you know i had a few months where i'm like you know i'm gonna see if this really makes a difference and then i got like three or four months in and i'm like this sucks like i miss caffeine and i i went back to it it's glorious and when i don't have it it's just like everything is like dull and honestly like colors look different to me like it's yeah
[41:38] how much I depend on it I mean if you're going to be dependent on anything it's probably the best alright man that's a wrap just a quick reminder if you're watching this on YouTube to go to the Subtle Art Not Giving a Fuck podcast YouTube channel we're moving the whole podcast over in July you'll be able to watch everything there so make sure you go over subscribe there new episodes will stop showing up on the Mark Manson channel soon see you there

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