Why I Quit My Goals Halfway, and the Beast Technique

You give up on your goals before reaching them for a boring reason: the goal sits farther away than one tank of emotional fuel can carry you, and nobody put a single gas station along the road. It isn't laziness, and it isn't weak character. The brain simply can't hold motivation for a year with zero rewards in between, and two well-studied mechanisms in psychology explain why. Here's what that looked like on a real call, with real numbers.

"So what do you actually want?" I ask Natalie on a call.

"Well, in a month. Twenty people," she says.

"Why do you need twenty people?"

"To make money."

"So how much money do you want to make?"

"Enough to go to the Maldives. Probably around four hundred thousand."

Then she gets tangled up: the Maldives, then Vietnam in November, then a new car because she's tired of the old one. I keep her on the same question, why, and a minute later she admits it herself: "Igor, I get it, I'm impossible to talk to right now." For the whole call she's been naming things that are either already happening on their own or that she doesn't really need. The real desire only surfaces on the third try, when I ask her straight out what her dream car is.

"A Lexus," she says.

It's not willpower, it's distance

You don't quit your goals because you're lazy or weak-willed. You quit because the goal sits farther away than you can go on one tank of emotional fuel. The brain physically can't hold motivation for a year without a single intermediate reward, and that's how every human mind works, regardless of character or how much willpower a particular person has. I see this in about every third conversation over twenty years of working with entrepreneurs.

In her best months Natalie makes 150,000 rubles. The Lexus she named costs about five million. If she puts most of that aside every month, which is already an optimistic scenario, the road to the goal stretches to about five years. Even if I hand her a magic trick right now and her income doubles, that's two and a half years on the road. Quadruple it, and it's a year. A year in which you can't reward yourself once, can't slip once, can't overspend once, all for a result that only shows up at the very end. What share of people can carry that load? A tiny one. That's why you don't get there: the goal isn't bad, it just sits beyond your nearest route.

Why long-term goals don't feel motivating, even when you really want them

Two mechanisms are at work here, and science studied both of them long before I ever ran into them on calls.

The first is construal level theory, developed by psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman. The idea is simple: the further away an event is in time, the more abstractly you think about it, in terms of "why" rather than "how." A vacation a year from now is an image of freedom and the ocean; a vacation next week is a hotel booking and plane tickets. Goals work the same way. A distant Lexus is a pretty, abstract picture that has nothing to do with what you need to do tonight (more on the theory).

The second is hyperbolic discounting, described by George Ainslie and later developed by David Laibson. In 1981 economist Richard Thaler surveyed people and got a classic result: they were as happy with fifteen dollars today as with a hundred dollars three years from now. That's how steeply the brain discounts a reward when it's far away (a breakdown of the experiment). Applied to goals, it means the promise "in a year you'll have a Lexus" doesn't register in your body as a reason to push today. The reward is too far away to hold on to.

Together, these two mechanisms explain why you give up on your goals before reaching them. Between today and the goal lies a desert without a single gas station, and the human mind simply isn't built to cross a desert on foot for one reward at the very end. The goal has nothing to do with it, and neither does weakness.

The Beast technique: how to stay motivated for a long-term goal

I tell Natalie straight: fine, I'll let you walk to the Maldives. The only question is at which mile you'll break. I'll feed you on the road and give you money for hotels, but you'll be the one walking, and most people never make it that far on foot. The mind just doesn't have enough for a bare route with no stops.

There's a technique I call the Beast technique. I broke it down in detail in a separate piece (on laziness and motivation), and here it works with exactly the same mechanics. When you set a goal, a small beast is born inside you: energy, excitement, a readiness to grind. You make a dash, you work twice as hard, and for a while the beast pulls you forward for free.

But as soon as the first intermediate result shows up and the goal is still far away, the beast asks for a reward. If you tell it "no, we can't relax, we're not there yet," it agrees once. Then a second time. On the third it runs out of breath and bolts, and all your motivation sinks at once, rolling you back to the point where you started.

With Natalie I walk through it on her own numbers. Right now she makes 150,000 a month; that's point A. What will her reward be when she hits 250,000? What desire will make her happy exactly at that milestone, and not at the end of the road? Then, what at 400,000. What at 700,000, where the Lexus really is within reach, three or four months away without a loan. Every milestone needs its name in advance, before you get there, otherwise the beast runs up to the gas station and finds it empty.

The reward for a milestone doesn't have to cost as much as the goal itself, or you'll simply eat the Lexus budget on the way to the Lexus. Dinner somewhere new, a day off, a small thing you've wanted for ages. It isn't there to treat yourself to something expensive. It's there so the beast feels the road gives it something besides a number at the finish line.

How to break down a big goal so you don't quit

1. Pin down point A. Not "roughly," but a specific number: how much you earn or produce per month right now.
2. Name point B as a number, not as "more." What the thing you actually want costs: a specific Lexus for a specific five million, not an abstract "travel" or "a new car."
3. Calculate the road at your current speed. Divide the price of the goal by what you've actually been setting aside or earning on top each month, confirmed by the last few months.
4. Test the road against the limits of the mind. If the timeline comes out longer than three or four months without a single intermediate win, it's a forced march to the Maldives on foot, and statistically you won't make it.
5. Find the nearest gas station. A milestone within three or four months that you can actually reach at your current speed.
6. Name the reward for that milestone in advance. Before you reach it, not after, when the brain is already getting ready to bolt. The reward has to be a real desire, not something that would have happened anyway.
7. Get there, collect, set the next gas station. Repeat the chain all the way to the goal, each time with a new named milestone up ahead.

What if you've already reached the goal and just don't see it

There's one more trap I see in almost every other person on breakdowns like this. People name as their goal something that's already happening in their life. I asked Natalie, is your goal to travel? She says yes. But you're already flying to Vietnam in November and then to the Maldives, I tell her. What's the point of setting a goal for something that's already done?

This isn't an abstraction for the sake of argument. A kid doesn't set a goal to have dinner when Mom cooks dinner every night anyway; he sets a goal for it to be tastier, even though that isn't in his control at all. Adults do the same thing with money: they call their usual income plus a little their goal, even though reality already covers that number. You can't make brushing your teeth a goal, you already brush them. Before you calculate the road to the next gas station, check that the goal is actually ahead of you, and not where you're already standing.

Breaking a distant goal into near ones isn't only my working practice with hundreds of entrepreneurs. It's a separately proven area of psychology, the goal-setting theory of Edwin Locke and Gary Latham: close to a thousand studies from 1968 to 2019 show that breaking a distant goal into near subgoals raises self-confidence and the final result, precisely because near milestones give you the feedback a distant goal physically can't (an overview of their research).

Back to Natalie. A minute after she finally names the Lexus, I ask her about the reward for 250,000 a month. She stays silent longer than she did on the question about the dream itself. Finding the big goal turned out to be easier than naming a small reward on the way to it. And that's exactly what breaks people more often than the distant goal itself: the dream isn't too big, the next gas station just has no name.