DO WE REALLY NEED GOALS?
Stop skipping your life to reach a finish line that doesn't exist.
Do we really need goals?
I know, I know. It’s early 2026, and the “New Year Resolution …” is in full swing. I can only imagine your social feeds (and news feeds, for that matter) being filled with a chaotic mess of “New Year, New Me” posts, tips, lists and gurus preaching about 10x growth.
Just yesterday I saw a video titled, “If you’re already feeling Lazy in 2026…” and that was on 3rd of January. Wow. Apparently, if we aren’t “crushing it” by 7:00 AM on New Year’s Day, we’ve already failed … 🤯
This is not going to be that kind of post.
Ask yourself, how are you feeling right now when you’re bombarded with these messages about 2026 goals, making 2026 more successful etc. Does it feel like an exciting adventure, or does it feel like a heavy cold weight sitting in the pit of your stomach ?
If you’re feeling excited about it all, great. I wish you a happy new year, filled with adventure. But if it doesn’t feel like that, let’s talk about our obsession with goals.Even if you do feel super excited today … you might want to bookmark this. In 3 or 4 weeks, you might feel differently. (And trust me, you are NOT alone in that.)
The Great Goal Deception
Back when I used to teach at our Personal Fitness Trainer school I used to talk about the importance of goals and writing goals down. I would reference a legendary study from Harvard/Yale about how the 3% of students who wrote down their goals became more successful than the other 97% combined.
Turns out, that study never happened!
It’s a myth. One that I’ve been as guilty of keeping alive as many other “experts” in the personal development industry. We’ve been told and taught to build our entire lives around this pressure to project ourselves into a “better” future. In doing so, we innocently create this idea that “Then” is better than “Now.”
This means that every day you haven’t reached your goal, you’re essentially living as a “loser” waiting for the finish line. Does that really sound like the path to happiness? Or does it just sound like the recipe for perpetual urgency and anxiety?
The Pursuit of a Feeling
In sales, there’s a saying that nobody actually wants a drill; they want a hole in the wall. Or more accurately, they want the FEELING of looking at a family photo hanging in their home.
Goals are the same.
It’s not that you want the 10k month or the perfectly organised business. You want the FREEDOM you think those things will provide. For you, that might just be the feeling of sitting with a cup of tea at 10:00 AM without a mental “to-do” list screaming at you. You want to feel supported by your life, rather than being the one who has to support everyone else.
And here’s the thing: feelings come from the inside, not the outside. If a bank balance could create happiness, every wealthy person would be blissful–and we know that’s not the case. What if you could have that feeling now, instead of later?
The “Push” Problem
In my work, I’ve seen a dangerous cycle in traditional goal setting: Behind every push, there’s more pushing.
When we FORCE a goal through sheer willpower, it’s like a pendulum. Once you hit the target, the “pushing” stops. Why? Because you no longer have the urgency to keep doing the thing that felt so heavy to do.
But guess what? The pendulum swings right back to where you started. It’s either that, or the acceptance that eternal pushing is needed in order to maintain the goal and stay on top.
We tend to treat our actions towards a goal as a temporary tax we pay to reach the destination, rather than an evolution of who we are.
What’s the alternative?
Instead of the “push,” I want to talk about the PULL.
I call it Inspired Action. It’s the difference between dragging yourself to the gym because you “should” and going for a walk because the air feels crisp and your body is craving movement.
One feels heavy. The other feels like flow–as being pulled towards it.
Success isn’t something you achieve at the end of a 30-day sprint … Success is innate. As Annie Dillard famously said: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” If you spend your days in a state of stressed out urgency chasing the next goal that will make you happy, you aren’t “building” a better life–you are living a stressed out life.
Think about the movie Click. Remember Adam Sandler skipping the “boring” parts of his life with that remote—the traffic, the mundane Tuesdays, the slow moments? He thought he was winning, but he ended up missing the only moments that actually mattered.
When we treat today as a “tax” we have to pay to get to our goals, we are effectively using that remote control. We are skipping our own lives.
This is the fundamental risk I see with our obsession with goals: We make “Now” a place to skip over in order to get “Over There” (preferably as fast as possible).
Looking Back to Move Forward
Before we even think about 2026, let’s look at how you were in 2025, rather than just what you did. Here are a few questions I recently sent to a client to help them prime their mind for “success as a place to come FROM, rather than a place to get to”:
Where did you try to “force” things instead of letting them happen?
Which “shoulds” are you finally ready to drop?
What felt like a total “slog” or just drained your battery?
What was a moment where you felt truly “light” and present?
An Invitation: A Creative Conversation
I don’t want to give you more tactics or another “to-do” list. I want to invite you to change your “Operating System.”
I’m hosting a FREE live call–a Creative Conversation about goals and setting them in 2026. This isn’t a workshop on how to work harder. It’s a space to explore how to move with more ease, more presence and being more in flow with life.
(And because I want this to be a REAL conversation, I’m keeping it very small. Just 5 or 6 of us on this virtual call together.)
Let’s stop pushing. Let’s start flowing.
Why am I in your inbox? Because I believe the “no pain, no gain” era is over. I’m Adam Kawalec, and I’ve spent two decades helping leaders move beyond the cycle of struggle. Through my concept, The Comfort Zone Advantage, I teach a “wellness-fueled” approach to performance that eliminates the need for burnout. If you’re a high-achiever tired of overthinking, I’m here to help you find a path to success that actually feels like freedom.