THE BOOK: Do your Big-G Goals Serve You?
After finding myself frustrated, exhausted, and burnt out, I had to ask: Are the goals I set making my life better?
What’s a Big-G Goal? Well, those are the kind of milestone targets we set. At that time, my Big G Goals were about how many new members I could enroll or what kind of stages I could speak on. At another time in my life, writing a book was a Big G Goal of mine. And before that, completing a Ph.D. was my Big G Goal. They’re the kind of goals that make you feel validated for about 24 hours after you achieve them—or make you feel like a failure if you don’t.
Well, "a failure" was exactly what I felt like. So I went back to the drawing board. I wiped the slate so clean that I started to question whether Big-G Goals were helping me make my life better or whether they were simply squeezing me into stories someone else was telling.
My new book, What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal-Setting, arrives on November 1. But you can pre-order wherever you buy books: explorewhatworks.com/book
My guess is that, as a listener of this podcast, you’re interested in approaching life and work in new ways. You think critically about the shoulds and supposed-tos you grew up with. You notice how it always seems to be “up to you” to fix yourself, rather than questioning whether you’re broken at all.
You question conventional ideas of success and achievement. You notice when conventional wisdom starts to infringe on your values.
This book is for you.
I can guarantee you that it’s different than any other book on goal-setting—because it’s not really about goal-setting at all. It’s not a thinly veiled pep talk. It’s not about turning structural problems into your personal to-do list.
What Works will change the way you think about goal-setting—but it will also change the story you live in. Life and work don’t have to be structured around the next achievement or milestone.
What Works will help you take on the big questions that bubble under the surface of most advice on success and productivity—the philosophical, cultural, and political discourses that unconsciously shape how we think.
But in the end, What Works will also offer you a practical framework you can use to discover what works for you.
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