Why can't I achieve my goals and what is actually broken

It was around 2014. I was pulling up to my high school reunion in a car that was not mine, rehearsing in my head how casually I would slam the door and how my classmates would finally go quiet. I had no car of my own by then. I had sold it and put every last cent into a business that was on fire.

Why can't I achieve my goals: the short answer

If you have been setting goals for years and never getting there, it is almost never about willpower. Discipline works like an amplifier: it multiplies what is already there, and multiplying zero is pointless. The answer to "why can't I achieve my goals" is usually simpler and less flattering: the goal itself was set crooked, and the same crookedness repeats from person to person.

First break: the goal comes from your past. You want to prove something to somebody, and a goal like that does not switch off even when there is nobody left to prove it to. Second: the goal sits in the "have" column while the life you would actually live sits in the "be" column, so your mind sabotages everything the road requires, because you do not like the road itself. Third: the goal was set with a tool that does not fit you right now, and classic SMART goal setting, which rescues one person, drives the next one into a race. While the goal stands crooked, any discipline you pile on top is treating the wrong illness.

For thirteen years I have been asking rooms the same question: why did last year's plan not happen. About fifty rooms in four countries, plus two thousand one-on-one conversations. The first answer is almost never the real one, and the person is not lying: the real answer is awkward to say out loud in front of forty witnesses. Below are the three reasons those conversations kept converging on. Two caveats up front. This is my reading, not a count by protocol. And the people who come to me are already filtered by the fact that it did not work out for them.

Reason one we fail to achieve our goals: the goal comes from the past

Back to the reunion. The car, a black Mustang convertible, 4.6 liter, with vanity plates, I had sold six months earlier to plug a hole in the business. Showing up broke was not an option, so I begged a Lexus off a woman I knew for one evening, plates NEMO 63: the car belonged to the Nemo dolphinarium in Odesa. I walked around it, hung about, made sure I was seen. Absolutely nothing happened. Nobody came over and said, "Igor, you were right and we were wrong." People rarely say out loud the thing we build our twenty-year plans around. They have their own lives and their own feed, and we take up about three seconds of it.

You could say it was never about school at all. That I had simply gone broke and was ashamed. Maybe. But it was in front of those particular people that I felt the shame. Not my partners, not my family, not the bank I owed money to. There is your answer about whose court I was carrying around in my head.

I started in network marketing at eighteen. I invited everyone I knew, classmates, coursemates, and lost almost every friend I had within a few months. People mocked me to my face. Lida, a girl from my class, my childhood crush, laughed the hardest, and I carried her words around for years.

In 2010, five years after graduation, I had already been running my own PlayStation café on Sobornaya Square for about a year (how it opened without a single receipt, I broke down in "An investor handed me $32,000 in cash"). And that was when I heard Lida talking about me while I was standing right there: "I'm not surprised. I always knew Igor would make it." She said it calmly, like an obvious fact.

Whether she remembered her own laughter, I still do not know. But out loud it no longer existed. In her version of events she had always believed in me, and that version was sincere for her. All those years I had been reporting to a judge who was not there.

Now do the math with me. I got the recognition in 2010, exactly the thing I had been chasing: she said out loud that she had always believed in me. And four years after that I was still begging for someone else's car so I could drive to the same people and prove the same thing.

That is the main symptom of a goal set from the past. Reaching it does not close it. You can get exactly what you were after and find that nothing clicked inside. Which means tomorrow you will need to prove it again, a little louder and a little more expensively. The pain was mine the whole time, and I was the only one who could close it.

Psychologists describe this through goal self-concordance. Sheldon and Elliot, in their 1999 work across three longitudinal student samples, showed that goals a person pursues for their own reasons, rather than for somebody's approval, predict more sustained effort and, through that, a higher chance of attainment. The word "predict" matters here: self-concordance in those studies was measured, not assigned, and the horizon was one semester long. The bit about the sprint and the walk-away is me talking, from my own practice, not their data.

There is a second observation, about wording. A study of New Year's resolutions published in PLOS ONE in 2020 followed more than a thousand people, and a year later 58.9% of those who framed the goal as "I want to reach" considered themselves successful, against 47.1% of those who framed it as "I want to stop". There is no causality here whatsoever: people picked their own wording, and quitting smoking is objectively harder than taking up running. But the direction matches what I have been watching in rooms for years.

The goal "I'll show them all" gives you a savage start. I broke through my first wall on exactly that fuel. There are no wrong reasons to begin. There are reasons you cannot finish on: the fuel runs out and you are left holding a business you built for people who forgot about you inside a week.

Reason two you lose motivation after a month: you want to have it, not to be it

There is a simple chain: be, do, have. The motivation industry flipped it backwards and taught people to walk the route have, do, be. I want to have a good body, so I have to do something, so someday I will become someone.

Watch how this plays out. A person wakes up, looks in the mirror, buys trainers, leggings, a full-year membership so there is no chance of quitting, and downloads a calorie tracker. The first trip to the gym is full of hope, and a week later he already hates it. Laziness has nothing to do with it.

Doing has a consequence, and that consequence is called being: chicken breast and buckwheat, sore muscles, conversations about protein, an alarm at six. He wanted to have a body, and what he got thrown in was the life of a man he never intended to become. From there the mind starts negotiating. It finds a sore knee, it finds a series to watch, it finds an important meeting.

I went from 115 kg (254 lb) down to 81 kg (179 lb). It took eight months in 2025, and character had nothing to do with holding on. I found a movement I come back to on my own: for me that is running, I went to the gym and basically never got off the treadmill. For someone else it is tennis, cycling, judo, swimming. There is no shortage of sports in the world, and finding your own among them is more honest than buying a membership twelve years running and hating yourself every January.

This is not only my own experience. The large systematic review by Teixeira and colleagues in 2012, covering 66 studies and 72 independent samples, showed an important split: starting to exercise is helped by the motivation "I need this and I approve of it", but sticking with it for years is predicted only by intrinsic motivation, meaning enjoyment of the activity itself. Put simply, "I should" starts you, "I like it" keeps you.

Think back to playing football as a kid. It did not stop us that there were no goalposts, we played from schoolbag to schoolbag. It did not stop us that there was no ball, anything worked as one, from a slipper to a beer bottle. We destroyed our school shoes because mum would not notice. Not one of us had a goal of having an athletic body. We just wanted to be in that game, and the body showed up as a side effect.

There is a scene I love in the Aladdin cartoon. Jafar wants to be the most powerful being alive and makes his third wish: make me a genie. Aladdin was counting on exactly that. Jafar turns into a giant red genie, receives all the power in the world, and receives with it the shackles and the lamp he will now be sitting in. Every "have" has its own "be", minuses included. If you are not ready to love the minuses in advance, you will sabotage yourself right up until you quit.

Reason three: why SMART goals don't work for you right now

Here comes the thing that regularly gets me beaten up in the comments: goal setting is not a universal tool. It is brilliant at one stage and destructive at another.

I will start with other people's data rather than my own, because there is a rare chance here to show the effect in numbers. In that same New Year's resolution study, people were randomly split into three support groups. The first got general information. The second got a talk about support plus one exercise on obstacles. The third got the full package: training in SMART goal setting, instructions to frame goals as approach goals, sub-goals, and four letters with exercises. Guess which group did the worst. A year later, the share who considered themselves successful was 62.3% in the second group, 55.9% in the first and 52.5% in the third, the one that had been taught proper goal setting in detail.

I am not going to turn one study into a law. But it is exactly what I see in the rooms: a person is handed more technique than he can carry, and the technique starts working against him.

Next comes my own map, and I will say up front what it is worth: the eight levels of personal development I have described are a pattern written out of thousands of sessions. Not peer-reviewed research, not a law of physics, a working map. Use it accordingly.

The idea is simple. When a person has just broken out of the system and is running on raw motivation, a hard goal and a vision board work like a life ring. He sets a number, sinks his teeth in and breaks through the wall. When the basic money is already covered and the next push is no longer about survival, that same hard numeric goal starts working like a noose. The metrics look great, and inside there is nothing, and the next achievement brings no joy at all (what happens to a person at that point I unpacked separately in "Success but no happiness").

Sound familiar? You take a tool that once worked on you, you roll it out again, and things get worse. You give the same advice to a friend, and for the friend it works. And you draw the only conclusion available: something is wrong with me.

I went through this in 2020, when I noticed I was telling people one thing and in 2012 had been telling them another, while people were getting results both then and now. A tool is never right in general, it is right for the task and for the stage. The way "you can't divide by zero" is true right up until the class where they teach you limits.

The objection I hear most often. "Igor, but there is research proving goals work, there is Locke and Latham, there is the whole of corporate management." There is, and it is all honest: specific and difficult goals do improve performance, but only paired with a clear plan of action, on their own they guarantee nothing. The psychologist Gabriele Oettingen showed the flip side: focus only on the pleasant picture of the result without working through the obstacles, and the effect can invert into a minus.

Even the academic position does not say "set a goal and everything will work out." My experience adds one thing to it: a plan and an obstacle script are useless if you have not sorted out whose goal this is in the first place.

How do I know if a goal is really mine

The quickest test: ask yourself "what for" several times in a row, without stopping at the first respectable answer. "What for", not "why", and the difference is fundamental. "Why" looks backwards, and you always have a story ready for it. "What for" looks forwards, and that is where the real work starts. I push this question to seven repetitions, and usually on the fifth or sixth the person goes quiet and produces something he did not expect from himself. One client of mine travelled that way from thirty million for building a racetrack down to a need for someone to tell him he had done well. I unpacked that story in detail in "Laziness doesn't exist", so I will not repeat it here.

The second exercise, the one I run at Liberation, is longer but more accurate. Take a sheet of paper, split it into three columns, and write down whatever comes, unfiltered.

First column, experience. What life experience do you want, what moments, what feelings, what possibilities. Experience specifically, results do not go here.

Second column, growth. What kind of person do you need to become for all that experience to be normal for you. What skills, what qualities, what realizations.

Third column, contribution. What will the person you become be able to give the world, what will be left after you.

I deliberately ask people not to write results, and it is not a trick. It is the condition of the experiment: the point is what stays on the page once the number is taken away. People almost always discover that what they wanted was a set of states, and they plugged in a number because a number is easier to write in a notebook. Money turns out to be an instrument, and the moment that is visible on paper, the goal stops being somebody else's.

How to set goals you will actually achieve: six steps

1. Test the goal for the past. Write your goal down and answer honestly: who is supposed to find out about it. If specific people you are proving something to show up in the answer, reframe it around where you are going: "to live this way with these people" instead of "to prove I am not a loser".
2. Move the goal from "have" to "be". The question sounds like this: who do you want to be every day on the way to that result. If you do not like the answer, the goal is not yours, and no amount of discipline will fix that.
3. Fall in love with the minuses of that being, in advance. Write out the three worst consequences of the life you are ordering. Unpredictable hours, being public, responsibility for other people's salaries. Ready to take them along with the pluses, then the goal is yours.
4. Ask "what for" seven times in a row. Stopping at the first pretty answer is not allowed. The real answer is usually uncomfortable.
5. Test the tool on the person you are today. A simple sign: the number on the fridge used to fire you up, and now it sets your teeth on edge. That is a signal to change how you set goals, not to raise the pressure.
6. Write the plan as "if, then". The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer calls these implementation intentions: not "I will run more", but "if it is Tuesday and eight in the morning, then trainers and forty minutes". This is the only tool in the article with a large, direct evidence base, and it also answers the main complaint about goals: a goal without a plan of action guarantees nothing on its own.

When it isn't about goal setting at all

There are three situations where everything written above does not work, and I am obliged to name them.

First: a goal you did not choose and cannot drop. A loan, a sick parent, children, obligations with no exit. There is nothing to reframe here. But you can choose something else: what kind of person you carry it as. Carrying it on shame and carrying it on a decision are two different kinds of wear on the body, and you will feel the difference within the first month.

Second: external limits. A market that collapsed, war, illness, no money to start with. The mind has nothing to do with it, and telling a person in that situation that his "goal is set crooked" is mockery.

Third, and most important: a state where there is no strength at all. If nothing has brought you joy for months, if sleep is gone, if getting out of bed is hard, if you have stopped wanting anything whatsoever, this is not a conversation about goal setting. This is a conversation with a doctor. No seven "what fors" will help here, and worse, they will add guilt for "not trying hard enough". How to tell that state from ordinary tiredness I covered in "Burnout is not tiredness".

Where I could be wrong

I do not think goals are harmful. I think a goal is a tool with indications and contraindications, and we have forgotten how to read the label. There are people whose lives genuinely change because of a number on the fridge, I have seen hundreds of them. There are stretches where without a hard, declared goal a person simply will not climb out of the hole.

And one more honest caveat, the kind rarely made in articles like this. All three reasons above I am mostly proving with my own biography, while outside research props them up from the side and says slightly more cautious things than I do. If you applied my scheme and it did not work, there is a simple explanation available: perhaps it is just wrong for you. Test it on yourself, not on my confidence.

But if you are reading this article, chances are you have already tried discipline, trackers, vision boards and morning pages, and your question now is a different one: why does it work for everyone else and not for me. The answer is usually that you are honestly and diligently achieving a goal nobody handed you, and that you never chose for yourself either.

I still remember that car's plates, NEMO 63. And I do not remember a single face I borrowed it for.