When Goals Stop Serving You: The Optimization Trap
Since finishing Ironman Hamburg in June, I have been back in build mode. Copenhagen next summer, a couple of 70.3s in between. A training plan works because it is rigid. That is also what makes it worth questioning.
Goals are supposed to help us live better. They give us direction, make progress visible, and help us tolerate discomfort today because we believe it is going somewhere worthwhile.
For ambitious people, goals often work extremely well. That may be the problem.
The better you get at pursuing goals, the easier it is to keep pursuing one long after you should have reconsidered it. You can become so good at execution that you stop questioning the destination. We spend five minutes choosing a goal and five years chasing it.
The danger is not that goals are bad. It is that a tool built to serve your life can quietly become the thing organizing it.
Do Goals Actually Work?
Yes, and the evidence is strong. Decades of research from Edwin Locke and Gary Latham show that specific, difficult goals reliably outperform "do your best." A concrete target focuses attention, helps you decide what to say yes to, and makes effort easier to sustain. If you want to run a marathon, pay off debt, build a business or finish an Ironman, a vague wish rarely gets it done.
So this is not an argument against goals. It is about what happens when the tool starts to matter more than the reason you picked it up.
When Does the Scoreboard Become the Game?
Human beings like things that can be measured: income, net worth, body weight, watts, race times, followers, hours worked, sleep scores.
The things that matter most are harder to measure. How connected you feel to your spouse. Whether your friendships are deepening. Whether you are enjoying your kids. Whether you feel curious. Whether you like the person you are becoming. None of those produce a satisfying dashboard.
So we drift toward what we can count. The metric starts as a proxy for something we care about. Then the proxy quietly becomes the objective.
Economists call one version of this Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Steven Kerr described the workplace version in 1975 in a paper titled "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B." More recently, Wells Fargo set aggressive sales targets and employees opened millions of accounts customers never asked for. The numbers were hit. The purpose, serving customers, was destroyed.
A group of business school researchers made a related case in "Goals Gone Wild" (2009): narrowly focused goals can produce tunnel vision, excess risk-taking and even unethical behavior.
I see a quieter version in my own field. Sleep trackers were supposed to help people sleep. In 2017, sleep researchers described patients who became so fixated on their wearable's score that chasing a perfect number made their sleep and anxiety worse. They called it orthosomnia. It was a small case series, but the mechanism is familiar. The measurement became the stressor.
What Is the Optimization Trap?
Optimization sounds unquestionably good. Who would not want to sleep better, train more efficiently, invest more intelligently, or use time more wisely?
But optimization carries a hidden assumption: that you already know what should be optimized. If you are driving toward the wrong destination, arriving 20 percent faster is not progress.
We optimize calendars until every hour has a job. We optimize vacations until there is no room to wander. We optimize workouts until exercise becomes another performance review. We optimize our children's schedules until childhood starts to look like a résumé.
There is a cost to the search for "the best" even when it succeeds. In a well-known study by Sheena Iyengar and colleagues, graduating students who tried to find the very best job, the maximizers, landed offers with about 20 percent higher starting salaries than their peers. They also felt worse about their jobs.
There is also a structural cost. Over-optimized systems are efficient and brittle. Every point of slack you squeeze out is also a shock absorber you removed. If your calendar, cash, sleep and energy are all tuned to zero margin, you are not optimized. You are one bad month away from a failure.
Is Persistence Always Wisdom?
Successful people are told to stay disciplined, push through, finish what they start. There is real value in that. But persistence and stubbornness look almost identical from the inside.
Sometimes discomfort means the work is hard. Sometimes it means you are heading the wrong way. High achievers are often trained to ignore both signals.
Part of what keeps us going is sunk cost. A bigger part is identity. "I am someone who finishes." "I don't quit." "I said I was going to do this." Those beliefs are powerful, and they can also trap you.
There is a real difference between "I want to finish an Ironman" and "I am an Ironman athlete." A goal is something you pursue. An identity is something you defend. The stronger the identity, the harder it becomes to ask whether the activity still serves you, because questioning the goal feels like questioning yourself.
Quitting is not always weakness. Sometimes it is what rational people do when new information changes the equation.
What Is a Better Model?
The answer is not to abandon goals. It is to put them back in their proper place.
Values tell you what matters. Goals give you direction. Experiments help you discover. Metrics provide feedback.
The order matters.
Values are deeper than targets: health, freedom, family, curiosity, contribution, mastery. You do not complete them. They are directions. A goal should serve a value, not replace it. If the goal is to earn more money for freedom, and earning more money gives you less freedom, something has gone wrong. If the goal is endurance training for health and adventure, and the training keeps damaging your health and relationships, the goal has started defeating the value underneath it.
The research points the same way. In a study of recent graduates, Christopher Niemiec, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci found that people who attained intrinsic goals, like personal growth, relationships and community, reported better wellbeing than before. Those who attained extrinsic goals, like money, image and status, did not get the same lift.
Goals turn a vague value into action. "Health" is abstract. "Run a half marathon in October" is concrete. That is useful, as long as the goal stays subordinate to the value.
Experiments are the step ambitious people skip. We decide what we want and jump to execution. Sometimes the smarter move is a three-month experiment instead of a five-year plan. Try living somewhere. Try a new business idea. Try a four-day week. Try an instrument you gave up. Experiments produce information, and they show you what you actually enjoy rather than what you imagine you might. Exploration should come before optimization.
Metrics work best as servants. A metric should answer a question, not become the question. The point of the sleep score is better sleep. The point of the race time is a richer athletic life. The point of the investment return is a better life. The number is not the life.
Three Questions Worth Asking
Every so often, take the goals you are chasing and ask:
Why did I choose this in the first place?
Knowing what I know today, would I choose it again?
If nobody else knew whether I achieved it, would I still want it?
The last one is the most revealing. Some goals are deeply personal. Others are mostly social signals, and it can be surprisingly hard to tell them apart.
The Goal Is Not to Stop Striving
Ambition is not the enemy. Goals are not the enemy. Optimization is not the enemy. Forgetting what they are for is.
I say this as someone who runs a clinic, a podcast, several entities and an Ironman training plan. Optimizing is my default setting, so this is a reminder to me first.
A rich life is not necessarily the one with the most goals achieved. It may be the one where your goals keep serving what you value. And sometimes the smartest move is not to push harder. It is to look up, reconsider the destination, and decide whether you still want to go there.
Which goal are you going to re-read this week?
Sources and further reading:
Baron KG, Abbott S, Jao N, Manalo N, Mullen R. Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far? Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2017.
Iyengar SS, Wells RE, Schwartz B. Doing Better but Feeling Worse: Looking for the "Best" Job Undermines Satisfaction. Psychological Science, 2006.
Ordóñez LD, Schweitzer ME, Galinsky AD, Bazerman MH. Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting. Academy of Management Perspectives, 2009.
Niemiec CP, Ryan RM, Deci EL. The Path Taken: Consequences of Attaining Intrinsic and Extrinsic Aspirations in Post-College Life. Journal of Research in Personality, 2009.
Kerr S. On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 1975.
Locke EA, Latham GP. Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation. American Psychologist, 2002.