What Would Happen If You Removed Half Your Goals?

Write down your goals. All of them, the real list, including the ones you would be slightly embarrassed to say out loud. Most people who do this honestly end up with somewhere between eight and fifteen.

Now, without deciding which ones, imagine the list is half as long. Not paused, not deferred. Gone. Sit with that for ten seconds and notice the first feeling.

For almost everyone it is not loss. It is relief, followed immediately by guilt about the relief. That sequence is worth paying attention to, because the relief is telling you something true and the guilt is telling you something borrowed.

Butter on too much bread

The book's ninth chapter uses a picture I have not been able to unsee. Take a fixed amount of butter and spread it on one slice of bread. Now spread the same butter over ten slices. Each slice gets a scrape so thin you can barely taste it. You have not gained nine slices of buttered bread. You have lost the one you had.

You are a fixed amount of attention. Ten goals do not make you a person with ten times the life. They make you a person spread over ten surfaces, thin at every one. The physics word is density: the same material over more area is less dense, and less dense things are easier to break.

This is why the long list feels heavy rather than exciting. It is not ambition. It is dilution, and some part of you knows it, which is where the relief came from.

The goals that were never yours

Now run the experiment properly. Go back to the list and, next to each goal, write one word: where it came from. Some will say me. A surprising number will say something else. Parents. Peers. A book. A version of me from five years ago. Someone I was trying to impress in 2019.

The book calls these borrowed goals a kind of weight: outcome drag and achievement drag, results you are gripping that were never really yours, scores you need in order to feel acceptable. They sit on the list looking exactly like the real ones. They are much heavier, because carrying something that is not yours takes more energy than carrying something that is.

Half your goals, in my experience, turn out to be borrowed. Removing them is not sacrifice. It is returning something to its owner.

What actually happens

Here is what the people who run this experiment for real report, and it is consistent enough that I trust it.

The remaining goals get faster. Not because there is more time, though there is, but because each one now has a whole person behind it rather than a tenth of one. Things that had been stuck for years move in weeks.

Life feels larger, not smaller. This is the counterintuitive part. Breadth felt like expansion, but it was the expansion of surface area. Depth is expansion of the only kind that registers as richness: being fully present in the thing in front of you.

And the guilt fades within a month, because it was never about the goals. It was about being seen to have them.

The smallest possible move

You do not have to remove half. Remove one. Pick the goal on your list that most clearly came from somewhere other than you, and cross it out. Do not replace it. Leave the space.

Then watch what the goal next to it does with the room. That is what half would feel like, and you can decide about the rest from there.

The same you, over less, goes deeper. It is the shape of the life this whole book is describing.

This essay draws on Chapters 4 and 9 of The Inward Singularity. All chapters are free to read on this site.