Why You Should Probably Have Just One Meta Goal in 2021

If you’re anything like me, then each year you sit down to review how you performed against your goals for the year, whilst also setting goals for the new year.

Typically, I’ve categorized my goals into the different dimensions of life — business, finance, health, craft, relationships, learning, and so on. This would extend to tangible and measurable micro-goals like ‘get 5 articles published by Harvard Business Review’ and ‘meditate for 10 minutes a day’ sitting alongside more confronting and perhaps less straight-forward life goals like ‘get your romantic relationship shit together’.

Come to the end of this exercise, my pages are full of both large and small pursuits, sometimes numbering more than 100 goals for the year.

Aside from the conditions for goal overwhelm that this creates, the exercise can leave me focusing a little too much on the micro-goals. Oftentimes in life though, if we truly reflect on it, there are probably two or three things we could do that would have a disproportionate impact on our lives and our subjective wellbeing.

Meta Goals

It might be a scary goal and one that we can only exercise so much control over — unlike tangible goals like ‘invest 20% of my salary’ — and therefore we shy away from it, but deep down, we…