At one point, I set a goal to have 500 students at my music school. We didn’t hit it.

Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t hit it. That sounds like too many students to manage. The goal was divorced from its context and the necessary infrastructure to support achieving it. It was arbitrary.

I know that lots of people are motivated by big goals like that. If the goal is designed to be too ambitious to reach, it pumps them up and they end up achieving more than they otherwise would have.

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Suppose I wanted to write an entire album of songs inspired by Reddit posts.

(I am picking this idea at random, but it’s kind of awesome, actually.)

One option is to think about it and obsess about it, then tell everyone that I’m thinking about it and ask their opinion or advice.

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One of the most accomplished people I know tends to think of herself as someone who doesn’t stick with things.

Where I see advanced degrees, she sees multiple aborted careers.

When I point to her array of creative works, she dismisses them as insubstantial

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Because I am a huge nerd, I like to time my tasks using a stopwatch.

Well, it’s not just because I’m a huge nerd. It’s also because I struggle with executive functioning and I have a terrible sense of time.

In order to be able to gain any mastery over my days, I’ve had to accommodate these weaknesses, so I use external tools like to compensate for my poor internal clock.

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I’m in the midst of growing my coaching and consulting business again after a several month hiatus.

It’s been fun to step up my activity and bring in some new clients now that I can fully focus on it.

It has suddenly become important to set a target number of clients. This is not a goal. I’m not striving intensely to get to that number.

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