Hey :) 

One thing I’ve always found interesting about goals is how often I catch myself judging other people’s.

You know the moment. You’re scrolling Instagram, someone shares their goals for the year, and your immediate reaction is:

For a long time, I thought my issue was the number of goals people set.

Then I sat down to set my own.

And I realised something uncomfortable: I had a lot too.

So I had to stop and ask myself what was really going on here. Because clearly, “too many goals” wasn’t the full story.

What I eventually landed on was this: 

It’s not the number of goals that matters.

It’s the degree of change required to make them real.

Let me give you a simple example.

Say you have a fitness goal: going to the gym three times a week.

If you’re currently not doing that consistently, this is a big deal.

To go from zero (or sporadic) to three times a week usually means:

That one goal alone can have a knock-on effect across your whole life.

And if that’s the case, it’s probably enough.

Trying to stack another goal of the same magnitude on top of it is where people tend to get into trouble.

So I started thinking about goals as sitting on a spectrum.

At one end:

At the other end:

The mistake isn’t having “too many goals”.

The mistake is having too many goals at the high-impact end of the spectrum.

If going to the gym three times a week is a major lifestyle shift for you, that might be the only thing you focus on for six months or even a year. You lock it in. It becomes normal. It stops requiring willpower.

Only then does it make sense to add more.

And here’s the important bit.

Once that routine is established, you can start adding what I think of as tweaks.

For example:

If you’re already going to the gym three times a week without thinking about it, adding something like:

“I want to hit X number of pull-ups over the year”

or

“I want to lift XXX kg for this specific movement”

…doesn’t really disrupt your life at all. You’re already showing up.

This is where a lot of people misunderstand ideas like habit stacking. The power isn’t in stacking everything. It’s in stacking only once the hard part is done.

When I looked back at my own goals through this lens, something clicked.

Yes, there were a lot of them.

But most of them were on the low-impact end of the spectrum. They were refinements. Tweaks. Things I was already doing anyway.

And there were very few that required a genuine overhaul of how I live or work.

That distinction matters.

So if you’re setting goals right now, here’s a useful question to ask yourself:

Be honest.

You might find you can only really handle one of those at a time. This might be why there's a lot of friction and you're failing with your goals. 

The rest?

Those can wait until the foundation is in place.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.