Every self-help guru peddles the same prescription: define your goals, make them SMART, reverse-engineer your dream life. It's become gospel in our optimization-obsessed culture, the holy grail of success and self-mastery.
But this entire framework is borrowed from factory floors, not ancient wisdom. It’s not even especially deep.
When you trace “goal-setting” back to its roots, you discover something unsettling. What we've been sold as timeless truth is actually industrial management repackaged as personal development. It’s a kind of shallow mimicry. A hollowed-out version of something that used to be about alignment, not control. Something that used to be about becoming, not performing.
We're using a system designed to maximize factory production to navigate the deepest questions of human flourishing. No wonder so many of us feel like we're machines always running…because we are.
Modern goal-setting didn't emerge from philosophy or psychology or religion. It was born in the early 1900s when Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced "scientific management:” the idea that human labor could be broken into measurable parts and optimized like machines.
Workers became productivity units. Managing them meant setting clear, trackable objectives.
This factory logic eventually colonized corporate culture through Peter Drucker's "Management by Objectives, which spawned the SMART goals framework we know and “love” today. What began as a system to squeeze efficiency from assembly lines became the dominant model for how we think about our lives.
We're applying industrial engineering to the art of being a human…just let that sink in for a moment.
I was a true believer for years. As recently as 9 months ago actually. SMART goals broken down. Using the Eisenhower Matrix to define what I should work on. Apps to track every possible personal. I treated my life like a startup, complete with reviews and performance indicators.
And don’t get me wrong, it definitely worked, superficially. Career goals achieved. Income targets hit. Physical milestones reached. But beneath the achievement lay a persistent hollowness, an underlying ache.
I realized most of my goals weren't arising from a deeper alignment, they were arising from compensation. From comparison. From unconscious scripts about who I was supposed to be rather than who I actually was.
I wasn't growing. I was performing growth. And quickly dying because of it.
Ancient philosophers understood something we've forgotten. The Greeks had a concept called telos: the innate essence or natural end toward which something unfolds. A seed's telos is to become a tree, not through strategic planning but through alignment with its nature.
The emphasis wasn't on engineering outcomes but on cooperating with what wanted to emerge. Growth wasn't forced; it was allowed.
Carl Jung later called this individuation; the lifelong process of becoming who you truly are by integrating unconscious patterns into conscious awareness. It's about wholeness, not optimization.
Modern goal-setting rarely asks you to integrate anything. It asks you to chase external markers while ignoring internal wisdom.
A seed doesn't strategize its way to treeness. It doesn't visualize branches or set leaf-count targets for Q3. It grows by aligning to its environment, shedding what doesn't serve, and trusting its inner blueprint to unfold.
That doesn’t mean it’s passive. Growth still takes effort. But the effort is rooted in truth and surrender, not performance.
When you're aligned with your nature, action stops feeling forced. It becomes an extension of who you are rather than a desperate attempt to become someone else.
A Different Approach
Traditional goal-setting has three fundamental flaws:
It's externally driven. Most goals come from comparison, social media, or unexamined "shoulds" rather than genuine self-knowledge. We end up optimizing for other people's definitions of success.
It fragments experience. Instead of working on integration and coherence, we end up breaking our lives into boxes: business, health, relationships. Each with its own metrics. But growth isn’t siloed. It’s systemic.
It bypasses inquiry. Goal-setting focuses on action. But real transformation starts with questions, not answers. "What do I want?" is not as powerful as "What’s trying to emerge through me?"
I’m not saying never set goals. I still use them. But they’re no longer the driver. They’re the feedback mechanism. They point me toward where my actions are out of sync with who I’m becoming.
Here's how the process has shifted:
Start with stillness and prayer. Before writing any goals, I create space to listen and I pray (because I understand I cannot unfold by myself). Then I ask: What's showing up in my body? What patterns keep repeating in my life? What feels heavy versus what feels true (not good, but true)?
Orient toward essence. I care more about the direction I'm facing than whether I hit specific targets. Am I living with integrity, virtue, and love? Does this path feel aligned with who I'm becoming? Does it serve the greatest Purpose?
Let goals serve emergence. When I do set goals, they're designed to help something unfold rather than prove something to others or myself.
This isn't about lowering standards or abandoning ambition. It's about rooting ambition in truth rather than performance.
Instead of asking "What are my goals this quarter?" I've learned to ask:
What am I trying to force?
What patterns keep showing up that I've been avoiding?
What part of me is trying to emerge if I stopped interrupting it with “should's” and strategies?
Where do I feel most alive and authentic?
What would I do if I trusted my inner knowing as much as external advice?
Because in the end, most people don’t need better goals. They need better questions. Better attunement. Better alignment.
Not more checklists.
We're not here to optimize ourselves into some idealized version of success. We're here to unfold.
The work is not about defining yourself more clearly. It’s about revealing yourself more honestly.
And when you do that? The right actions start to arise naturally. The next steps become obvious.
The seed already knows how to become a tree. And you already know how to become yourself.
-Nader
(research & formatting done with AI)
This piece is important and timely.
It’s a call for re-enchantment in a world drunk on metrics.
And it’s written by someone who clearly walked the path, crashed, and listened deeply.
But perhaps the next layer is this:
Can we stop even trying to become better?