You Made the Goal Up

A two-million-dollar revenue goal can feel incredibly serious for something you invented.

That’s what ambition does.

You write a number down because you need direction.

Six months later you’re treating it like a moral obligation, and missing it somehow means something about you.

A guy I work with has been building his business for roughly a year.

When he started, the goal was pretty clear: replace the income he had been making in ministry, do something he actually enjoyed, and build something of his own.

I asked him where the number came from. He made it up. That sounds almost insulting when you say it that plainly, but I think ambitious people need to hear it.

You choose a revenue target because it gives you direction.

You decide what you want to earn, how large you want the company to become, what kind of house you want, how much you want invested.

Fine.

Goals are useful.

But somewhere between choosing the goal and pursuing it, we forget who wrote the thing.

A preference becomes a target, the target becomes an expectation, and eventually the expectation starts behaving like an obligation.

Now missing a number you voluntarily chose feels like a character failure.

Changing it feels like quitting.

Reaching it barely registers because the next number has already appeared. You can spend your entire life behind a finish line that only exists because you keep moving it.

That doesn’t mean every “should” is imaginary.

If people depend on you, that matters.

If you made a promise, signed the contract, accepted responsibility for somebody, you don’t get to shrug and say all expectations are socially constructed because the obligation became inconvenient. Some things really are yours. But a two-million-dollar revenue goal is not sacred because you typed it into a spreadsheet in January.

And I think this gets more difficult as you become successful because reality starts offering you things you actually could do.

In his case, several large projects could land at once.

He could take all of them, hire people, expand capacity and probably make considerably more money. His first instinct was basically:

If the work is there, why wouldn’t I?

Then another question showed up. For what?

That question creates trouble because ambition is very good at answering how and terrible at answering why.

It can tell you how to grow, how to hire, how to squeeze more production out of the year.

But once the business is already doing what you originally asked it to do,

“more”

needs a better defense than the fact that more is available.

Maybe he should take every project.

Maybe he should double the business.

Maybe the next target is exactly what he wants and the discomfort of reaching it is the price he has consciously decided to pay. Or maybe he has been obeying a goal for so long that he forgot he was allowed to question it.

That distinction matters because responsibility is not blindly honoring every standard you have ever created.

Sometimes responsibility means putting the standard itself back on trial.

What was this supposed to build?

Do I still want what it costs?

And if the answer has changed, am I changing direction because reality clarified what matters to me, or because I got uncomfortable and want an excuse to stop?

You don’t get a clean answer handed to you.

That’s the burden of being the person who made the goal in the first place.