When Goals Aren’t Clean
why hard work so often leads nowhere
Most people don’t fail to make meaningful change because they lack effort or discipline. They fail because they never fully commit to a clear direction.
I’ve landed on a simple three-step rule that helps get me on the right track when I want meaningful change:
1. Decide what I want
2. Accept what that goal requires — and what it rules out
3. Align my actions fully around it
Now, here’s the kicker. Most people think they’ve done step one, but they haven’t resolved it cleanly.
They say they want one outcome, but they’re still attached to another that pulls in a different direction. And once that tension exists, step two can’t be fully accepted.
The result is a mixed set of actions. You get periods of alignment followed by quiet course-corrections. And over time, this kills momentum.
Fitness is one of the clearest ways to see this, because many fitness goals are structurally incompatible. Gaining muscle requires you to train, eat, and recover in a very specific way. Losing fat requires a different, and often opposing, set of behaviours. There just isn’t much overlap between the two.
When people try to pursue both at the same time, they usually end up in a frustrating middle ground, pushing hard without making meaningful progress in either direction.
I’m certainly not exempt from this, and this has become even more obvious to me recently. I have a clear goal of wanting to build muscle. At the same time, being fit and lean is also important to me.
As I stepped up my weight training in line with my goal of building muscle, my body started to feel increasingly beat up. Stiff ankles and calves on waking. Achy joints. Painful knees. It got to the point where even sitting down and standing back up felt awkward.
Because I wanted to hold onto a certain level of fitness, I had kept around 90 minutes of zone 2 cardio in my week. A mix of running, rowing, and air bike.
Eventually, I talked it through with my PT and we decided to remove zone 2 for now. It was clearly interfering with recovery, which is non-negotiable if the goal is to build muscle.
The plan now is simple: lift three times a week, walk 10k steps a day, swim once a week, and keep up with mobility work. Everything is now elegantly oriented in one clear direction.
I’m only a week and a half in, and my body already feels noticeably better.
To be clear, there is room for zone 2 in a muscle-building program, and over the long run maintaining fitness does matter. This isn’t about banning it forever. It’s about timing and priority. Once my body feels better again, I’ll likely reintroduce it carefully, test the impact, and only keep it if it doesn’t pull against the primary goal.
Looking back, the issue wasn’t effort. It was that I had decided that my goal was to build muscle, but I was still holding onto a parallel fitness goal. And because of that, I never fully accepted what building muscle actually requires. The result was a mixed set of actions that weren’t all pulling cleanly toward the same outcome.
Of course, this isn’t a fitness problem. I just used that as an example because fitness makes it very obvious, and this happened to play out for me recently. The same pattern shows up in lots of other areas of life and work.
Investing is a good example. You might start out aiming for steady, low-risk returns and build a portfolio to match. Then you see others making higher returns, start chasing a bigger upside, and quietly change your behaviour. Before long, you’re no longer fully committed to either approach. The result is a mixed strategy that often underperforms both.
The same thing happens in careers. People say they want growth or change, but quietly optimise for comfort and security, and they end up stuck in the middle.
I’ve made both of those mistakes myself, more than once.
It might sound like I’m saying anything other than pursuing a transformative result is a mistake. But, that’s not what I’m saying.
Balance can be a perfectly valid goal when it’s intentional. Maintenance can sometimes be exactly what’s needed. And when balance or maintenance is the aim, a middle-ground strategy makes sense.
What I’m pointing at is something different.
The real problem shows up when someone says they want meaningful change, but remains attached to another outcome at the same time. That attachment leads to mixed actions, constant course-corrections, and progress that never quite materialises.
That isn’t balance. It’s hedging. And it’s the reason so many people work hard without getting anywhere near the result they say they want.
So, let’s recap.
If you want meaningful change, you have to move through three steps:
1. Decide what you want
2. Accept what that goal requires — and what it rules out
3. Align your actions fully around it
Step one has to be clean. Take your time with it. Not just “I want X”, but “I want X enough that I’m willing to let competing outcomes go, at least for a season.” If that decision isn’t clean, step two will be negotiated, and step three will turn into a mixed set of actions.
If balance or maintenance is the goal, that’s fine. Own it and build accordingly. The real problem is wanting meaningful change while quietly hedging. That’s where people work hard and still stay stuck.
I’ll end with a simple reflective question. Think of something you’ve been trying to achieve, but have been finding hard. Take a step back for just a moment. What do you actually want right now? Are your actions aligned with that, or are they trying to serve two outcomes at once?