I recorded myself thinking through this article on a run. The raw version lives on my YouTube channel, While YJ Runs. I'd love to hear if this format works for you. Tell me if it's terrible.
Most people can’t answer one simple question: what do you want out of this life? You’ll get a shrug, or a canned answer, or somebody else’s answer dressed up as their own.
I’ve come to think this is the only question that matters. Not because the answer is hard to find, but because we’re allergic to sitting with it long enough to hear ourselves think.
Here’s what I’ve learned about goals after spending my life getting to a place that was very good at handing them to me, and some time outside trying to write my own.
One thing up front: this isn’t about work goals. Work goals are a different conversation, and frankly an easier one. Someone will always be happy to hand you the next rung. The hard, important conversation is the other one; the one about what you want out of your actual life, which nobody’s going to hand you at all.
Start with the tombstone
Start with the destination. You can’t see the path from here anyway, and the destination is easier; it’s how we used to do it as kids when adults asked what we wanted to be when we grew up and we answered without flinching.
The goals worth having are the ones you’d want on your tombstone. Good father. Kind. Wise. Present. A son my parents are proud of. A friend people can count on. Have at least one of these. If you don’t, you’re climbing a ladder and you don’t know whose.
The test for whether you’ve found the right one is whether you sit up a little straighter when you write it down. If the words feel performative, or like something you’d say in a job interview, they aren’t yours yet. Keep going.
For me, one version of it is the hike. Specifically: being the kind of father my kids remember taking them into the hills with no agenda. No summit. No mileage target. No lesson. Just walking until somebody wants to stop and look at a bug. If that’s on the tombstone, I’ll have done something right.
Here’s the thing about tombstone goals that took me a while to appreciate: you never finish them. And that’s the feature, not the bug.
Work goals are achievable, and that’s what makes them feel productive, but it’s also what makes them hollow. You hit VP and the next morning it’s “now what”. You hit the number and it crumbles in your hand like sand. Anything you can finish turns out not to be the thing. Tombstone goals don’t have that problem. There’s no finish line for being a good father. You just keep showing up, and you get to keep showing up for the rest of your life. The practice is the point.
Can you practice it today?
Not every life goal passes this bar. “I want to be happy” sounds like a tombstone goal but it isn’t, and the reason is worth sitting with. Happiness is a mood, not a practice. You can’t sit down and do happiness; you can only set up the room and hope it shows up.
The test is this: can you embody it today, in some small action, with nothing but your own behavior?
Being a good father means taking the kids on the hike this Saturday. Leave the phone in the car. Being kind could mean sending the message you’ve been putting off. Don’t post the angry thing. Being a good son might be calling your parents tonight, not “soon”.
In any case, happiness turns out to be what shows up when you’re busy doing the others well.
Write it down. Or don’t.
There’s something about putting words on paper that makes them real. You can’t hide from a sentence you’ve written. The vague longing in your head becomes embarrassingly thin once it’s sitting there in black and white, and you’re forced to either sharpen it or admit you don’t mean it.
So write it down. A page, a paragraph, five sentences. Whatever fits.
But if you already know what you want, deeply and without flinching, the writing is optional. Some people need the document. Some people need the clarity. Don’t let the ritual become the point.
The point is action.
Use the goal as a filter
You can have the most beautifully articulated life vision on the planet and it will do nothing for you if you don’t move. Goals don’t change your life. Decisions do. And decisions only count when you make them with your hands and your calendar, not in your head at 11pm.
Once you know what you want, the goal becomes a filter. Every opportunity, every invitation, every shiny object floating past gets held against it. Does this serve the thing? Yes, lean in. No, decline. Especially if it’s flattering. The Saturday hike stays on the calendar. The prestigious-sounding thing that would quietly eat the day doesn’t.
This sounds obvious. It is not what most people do. Most people say yes to whatever’s loudest, then wonder why their year disappeared.
The compounding benefit of filtering well is what people call luck. Luck is preparation meeting opportunity, and the preparation half is almost entirely under your control. Knowing what you want is preparation. Saying no to the wrong things is preparation. Showing up consistently in the area you care about is preparation. Do that work for long enough and opportunities you couldn’t have planned for start looking custom-wrapped for you. They were always there. You couldn’t see them before because you didn’t know what you were looking for.
You can only change yourself
The goal tells you what to do. Not anyone else. You can’t write down “I want my kids to love me” and expect them to cooperate on a schedule. You can’t decide you want a better relationship and force the other person to meet you there. You can’t will your parents into understanding you.
Life happens through give and take with the world. Everyone is operating inside the same system, with their own goals, their own incentives, their own bad days. The only lever you control is your own behavior: what you learn, what you practice, who you show up for, how you act when nobody’s watching.
So focus there. Prioritize the learning. Send the message. Do the rep. Let the world respond however it’s going to respond, and adjust.
Wanting something from someone else is not a strategy. Becoming someone worth being close to is.
The middle is mostly discomfort, and that’s the good part
The journey to anything worth having is mostly doubt, grief, and quiet fear that you’ve made a terrible mistake. Not occasionally. Mostly. The triumphant arrival photo at the end is maybe 1% of the experience. The other 99% is sitting with “what if this doesn’t work”.
You’ll feel less supported than you expected, too. The friends who cheered you on at the start get bored. The people you thought would understand don’t. You’ll be alone with it more than feels fair.
There’s a “whatever it takes, grind through it” framing for this part, and I won’t pretend that mentality isn’t real or useful. But I much prefer the other one: the discomfort is here right now, and I’m enjoying it anyway.
I’m writing this, in part, on a trail run. Lungs burning, legs heavy, recording between climbs. I have no idea where this particular thread leads. That’s a big part of why it’s fun. The discomfort isn’t the tax I’m paying for some future payoff; it’s the texture of doing the thing I want to be doing. Growth happens because you’re moving toward something you care about, and the burn is how you know you’re moving.
If it felt comfortable the whole way through, it probably wasn’t a stretch worth making. So when the doubt hits, don’t grit your teeth and white-knuckle it. Look around. Notice the trees. You’re already in the part that matters.
When the doubt hits, don’t panic
The instinct when you feel stuck is to thrash. Work harder. Pivot. Quit. Burn it down. Try five new things at once.
Don’t.
When the fear shows up, the move is the opposite. Slow down. Re-read what you wrote, or what you would have written. Ask yourself, calmly, whether the destination still makes sense. Most of the time it does. Your circumstances haven’t changed; your nervous system is having a bad afternoon. You had one bad hike. You didn’t become the wrong kind of father.
If the destination still makes sense, the answer is almost always the same. Heads down. Next small action. Then the one after that.
That’s the whole technique. Pick a goal you can practice. Use it as a filter. Take action. Don’t panic when it hurts.
What do you want?
Sit with that. The answer is the only one that matters.
Tombstone matters.
A very timely reminder, thanks 🙏