Hey :) 

I've been thinking about why goal setting so often feels empty.

Most people do everything they're supposed to do. They write the goals down. They create a vision. Maybe they do OKRs. And then... not much changes. The business doesn't feel meaningfully different. There's busyness, but it has a hollow quality to it — lots of motion, not much traction. I've been there myself, and I see it constantly in the people I work with.

I think the problem is that most of us were only ever taught the first part.

We were told to set goals, and we set goals. Nobody told us what to do next — how to actually connect those goals to the day-to-day decisions about what work to prioritise and what to leave alone. So the goals just sit there. Occasionally we look at them. Mostly we don't, because we haven't built them into any kind of decision-making process. They're not filtering anything.

What I've come to believe is that a vision is the starting point of strategy, not the destination. Writing it down matters, but only because of what it enables next.

Here's the question I now think is worth sitting with: what would need to be true about the business for me to achieve this?

If I had that level of revenue, what would the business look like? What would we be competent at? What would we have built? Working backwards from the vision gives you a rough picture of a future state — and that's useful. But the real work starts when you turn around and look at where you actually are right now, and ask: what's the single biggest problem standing between here and there?

That's the question that changes things. Not "what are our goals for this year?" but "what's the one problem that, if we fixed it, would make everything else easier — or unnecessary?"

I've worked with people who spent years thinking they were doing the right things — busy, committed, working hard — and when we finally challenged them to name their single biggest problem, the answer was often something surprisingly simple. Something that had been sitting there the whole time. And the uncomfortable truth was that if they'd addressed it two or three years earlier, they'd be in a completely different position now.

That's not a criticism — I've done the same thing. It's easy to gravitate towards the work you enjoy, the familiar tasks, the things that feel productive without actually being strategic. The harder discipline is to ask: what do I need to be working on, even if it's uncomfortable?

The way I now think about strategy is as a response to a problem. Not a grand plan, not a set of aspirations — a specific, considered response to the biggest challenge in front of you. You identify the problem, do the thinking, and then go fix it. Then you zoom back out, revisit the vision, ask the same questions again, and find the next problem. It's a loop, not a one-time exercise.

What I've noticed doing this is that the bigger goals actually get sharper over time. The vision becomes more refined, more credible, because you're building real evidence that the approach works. You also sometimes discover you're capable of more than you thought — which is a nice surprise.

The discipline that matters most, I think, is the willingness to focus on one thing at a time. Not just because multitasking is impossible, but because the quality of thinking you bring to a single problem — when you're not splitting your attention — is categorically better. Finish the thing. Then pick the next thing. Approach it sequentially. 

And when you're measuring progress, try comparing where you are now to where you were six months ago, rather than to where you want to eventually be. There will always be a gap between now and the vision. There will always be a tension. And that's the work that's still left to do.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.