You Don’t Need to Set Goals to Be Successful

All you have to do is show up, do the work, and see what happens.

There’s a lot of things you wish you knew.

You wish you knew when you were going to reach your goals, how much longer you should keep fighting, or if it’s even worth fighting at all.

But that’s why I don’t like goals. They give us direction, sure, but we accidentally end up living for them and cease to live for ourselves.

We lose sight of everything going on in the moment, of ourselves. Everything becomes about winning, manipulating the result, buying followers and likes. All to get to an outcome that’ll only make you feel good for five minutes before you try to reach another one.

The best way to succeed is to not set any goals at all. Instead: show up, do the work, and see what happens.

As much as people try to sell you formulas for success, no process is guaranteed.

What worked for one person is probably not going to work for you.

Sure, it’s possible to make $100,000 overnight by selling one course for thousands of dollars, but it might not happen to you. You could get a million views on a video your first week as a vlogger, but you might not.

You can’t copy what anyone else does. You can’t speed up the process. You can’t hack your way to the finish line.

But why does the finish line matter so much anyway? It’s only 10% of your life. The other 90% is the work, the living. Shouldn’t that matter more?

The process is your success.

Most people aren’t willing to show up.

Not even a little bit. The only place they’re allowing themselves to cross the line is in their daydreams. But as much as daydreams feel real, they’re not. You’re not going to succeed by laying in your bed and closing your eyes.

Just by showing up, you’re ahead of the game. You do what most people aren’t willing to even think about: you start.

You put in the work, whether it’s a lot or a little. I don’t know what that might look like for you. For me, it means I write and edit and publish as often as I can. It means that I write a book even though a part of me believes I can’t.

I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I love my life. (Most of it, at least.) I love that I get to write, which is what chasing this dream was all about in the first place.

Showing up, to you, might mean that you lock yourself up in the house and paint for a few hours. Maybe it means baking fifty cakes before you finally get it right. Perhaps you have to keep building businesses that fail until you finally stumble upon the perfect idea.

Whether you only have tiny wins along the way or fail countless times, you wake up the next day and do it all over again.

Eventually, you succeed. It might be in the career path you always had in mind or it might be different.

But you won’t know unless you try.

Even if you have two kids, or a full-time job, or just got married, you try. You learn and experiment. You win and you lose. You take different paths. You just do.

I’m twenty-two. I have no college education. I didn’t understand one thing about writing online when I started. But I’m here writing anyway because I decided that my excuses weren’t going to hold me back. I decided that I was going to show up, even if I didn’t want to and even if it was really hard.

If you do the same, you’ll end up somewhere.

It’s not just about showing up once.

You have to show up over and over again.

But I’m not talking about showing up for your dream. Show up for the dreamer— yourself. Don’t aim toward your goals because you want the money, fame, or credit.

Aim toward your dreams because you want to.

Work for you. Write for you. Paint for you. Bake for you. Design for you. Dance for you. Sing for you. Practice for you.

The goals? They’re nice to have. But what would happen if you showed up for yourself and then watched what happened with zero expectations?

I had a win last month, here on Medium. I made over $200. In the thirteen months I’ve been writing on here, I’ve never made that much.

I didn’t reach that goal because I sought to. I didn’t make a plan. I just tried writing every day and published as often as I could. Some articles did really well and some flopped.

But none of it matters. The only thing I could do was wake up the next morning and write an article with no idea whether it would be worth publishing or not.

Life is unpredictable, and people fear the possibilities, but that’s because they’re focusing on the wrong ones.

When you live a life without setting goals, your only choice is to believe that good things will happen. You need hope, and faith, and a little bit of confidence.

You could fail, but you could also win. You might fall, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stand up.

Forget everything that might go wrong. This is just about showing up for yourself. For your happiness.

Because you’re alive and you were meant to live.

Why should you start or keep chasing your dreams?

Because you’re here right now, and I see nothing stopping you. All the obstacles are in your head.

But look in front of you right now. What’s there? Nothing. Only a life to live.

Do you want to put yourself in a position to succeed? Then do the work. There’s nothing to it — just step into the car and start driving.

Take one step and then never stop. Even if you end up on a road so much more different than you originally thought. Go with it. Follow life, and as cheesy as it sounds, follow your heart. Go with what you think is the right choice at that moment.

And if you realize it’s the wrong decision?

The beautiful thing about being human is that we can learn from our mistakes, get back on the right road, and keep going like nothing happened. We were made to be persistent. So persist.

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