On Binary Goals

2024.10.27

LXXI

Failing to hit a goal can cause anxiety and discomfort, but if you don’t manage those emotions and make them useful, then you’re just torturing yourself.

Stress From the Binary Goal

For me, anxiety often comes from a lack of trust in myself to achieve the outcome I want. In that sense, anxiety is the friction between what I want to be true and either what I think is true or what I think will be true. 

This can be healthy and useful to push me in the right direction if I’m intentional about it, but if I’m unintentional, it can be counterproductive and corrosive.

One bad thought pattern that I’ve been fighting is the urge to reduce a long term goal into a binary outcome. Either I hit the threshold, and it’s fine, or I don’t hit the threshold, and I suck.

In some ways it feels like this cartoon of miners. One miner stops right before he hits a pile of diamonds and walks back dejectedly, with nothing. The other miner at the top maybe get all of the diamonds if he keeps going or… if he stops too soon, absolutely nothing.

When I think like that, of course I’m anxious about hitting the goal. Doing something like starting a company is staking so much time and effort on yourself, and the idea that you can walk away with truly nothing is pretty maddening. Again, over indexing on a binary goal amplifies this innate fear.

So, of course, I have some counter balances:

1. Remembering the larger goal that the big specific goal is supposed to bring me towards

2. Making sure that the journey is intrinsically valuable

Going back to these two things helps me stay sane when I would otherwise go insane.

The Real Goal

Jack and I have a big lofty annual recurring revenue (ARR) goal for BirdDog by the end of the year that we are unlikely to hit.

The reason we set this goal, however, was not to hit an ARR target. The goal does not exist for it’s own sake. The real goal is to build a sustainable business. ARR is a good proxy for building a sustainable business, but focusing solely on an ARR threshold as a binary benchmark misses the point.

In all honesty, if our ARR goal as a binary outcome was all that Jack and I cared about, we’d be really frustrated. Graded against ARR, Jack and I have made 0 progress in the past three months. That’s a hard and brutal pill to swallow. 

However, if our ARR goal was all that Jack and I really cared about, we’d also be functioning differently. In the past, I’ve occasionally sold things that people didn’t end up using or wasn’t super valuable to them. I don’t want to do that again. If ARR was exclusively what we were optimizing for, we might end up functioning that way. On top of that, there’ve been opportunities for contract work that we haven’t pursued. Maybe we would if ARR was the sole goal.

Since we’re trying to build a sustainable business, though, being so far behind on the ARR target should function as a wake up call to ask what we need to do to build a sustainable business. It’s not a command to go get revenue tomorrow, it’s an alert for us to ask what part of reality is out of alignment with what we thought was true.

Quite simply, we steeply underestimated the difficulty of building a product that people use. To do the thing we actually want to do, which is build a sustainable business, we need to figure out how to make something that people really want. That simply involves getting a strong core of users consistently getting value from the platform. Charging users can actually help with that, but it’s not charging for the sake of charging or charging due to anxiety related to the ARR goal. It’s charging for the sake of building a sustainable business.

Growth

The other implication of the mining picture that I take issue with is that it doesn’t acknowledge that you can make endeavors intrinsically valuable even if you don’t hit some big, binary goal. After all, when you’re starting a company, it’s super easy to make the endeavor intrinsically valuable, as you’re forced to learn so many different things to even have a real shot at succeeding. 

Over the last three months, I have become a much better programmer than I have ever been. I’ve also learned a bit about content and personal branding, and I’m learning a ton about what it takes to build a thing that people actually use.  

To me, all of these skills are intrinsically valuable. 

I am not just blindly swinging a pickaxe against the stone hoping for success to come pouring out–I am committing concentrated effort to each of the different crafts that go into being the kind of person who can successfully build a sustainable business. 

While it is possible to work at something every day and not get better at it, remembering that improving some set of skills is part of the prize for even trying helps to make sure that you aren’t just going through the motions. It helps to make sure that the time you spend with those skills doubles as intentional reinvestment in those skills.

One of the prizes for starting a company is a high degree of competency; if I’m worried about a goal and also don’t believe I’m growing and becoming more likely to hit it, then I might do some even deeper analysis to see how I’m actually spending my time that goes towards the goal.

If you’re actually in the mine situation where you are doing some monotonous task and seriously can’t learn anything more, I hope you’re getting paid for it.  

Back to Anxiety

If all I have is one big, binary goal that I am grading myself on, of course I will be brutally anxious if I’m not hitting it. 

My working solution to is to remember the real goal behind whatever I’m aiming for & and to make the process of getting there intrinsically valuable. 

Lagging on a goal sucks and is a targeted wake up, not a cause for oppressive anxiety.

Live Deeply,