Let me say this upfront: I don’t hate goals. I just don’t think they’re what most people believe they are nor real in a sense that from today until tomorrow you know what steps to take. Life is connected dots when you look back and where you have come from and motivational speakers are telling you what they did after they did it as if they knew to do it before they reached where they are today. That I do not believe in.
We’ve all been taught to set them and write them down. Make them SMART. I do not even know what SMART stands for anymore. I have to look it up. Ok….Ok…Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Build a plan. Hold yourself accountable. But after a few decades of watching people set goals and still feel stuck or worse, feel like failures for not reaching them I started to question the whole idea and even for myself.
That’s when the metaphor came to me.
Walking down stairs.
You don’t plan how to walk down a staircase. You just walk. You take one step, then another. You don’t leap halfway down and then check your progress on a spreadsheet. And yet somehow…you get where you’re going.
And think about this - I mean really think about it:
I don’t recall ever standing at the top of a staircase and saying to myself,
“Okay… I want to go to the bottom. So let me think this through. I need to bend my hip this much… flex my knee just enough… shift my weight forward… lower my center of gravity… calculate the tread depth…”
No. You just do it. I just do it. But how and why is a different question.
You don’t micromanage the biomechanics of every step. You don’t analyze the slope or study a staircase manual. You walk down stairs because it’s in you to do it. It’s embedded. You trust your own internal compass to take you somewhere. That somewhere is the bottom of the stairs in an orderly fashion I might add.
Not because there’s a goal but because you want to get there and there’s some kind of required movement. But you know it internally without thinking.
We live in a culture obsessed with outcome. We want measurable progress, quarterly benchmarks, vision boards, proof of success. We always of course if we are the #6 agent want to be the number 5 or number 1 agent. We fail on so many fronts not realizing that what we are to do is build core integrity and be our true selves.
But ask someone who’s actually built something meaningful, a business, a marriage, a body of work, and they’ll probably tell you: the moments that mattered most weren’t on the vision board. Others of course will have the obvious robotics of arrogance. As if they are the only ones who can get to where they are failing to give credit to the 30 people that lifted them up.
Then there are the integrity builders and the leaders. Not the ones who want to be coaches are teach people how to measure a business but the ones that still want to build families and help others do the same. Quietly.
The Problem With Big Goals
Here’s the paradox: The bigger and shinier the goal, the more it can distract you from the very motion that might get you there. Sometimes you even end up being kind of a joke among some. There are those that measure by one scorecard and those that measure by many.
If your goal is to get to New York City from Santa Rosa Beach, Florida and you spend all day obsessing about New York, researching every hotel, comparing every possible route, plotting your GPS pin 1,200 miles away you might never leave the driveway. You might post cool tik toks about it.
Or worse: you’ll take some convoluted, rushed, pressure-filled path and miss every beautiful stop along the way. Friends will have not been there with you really. Oh yes deal friends but not real friends.
The goal becomes your blinders. It narrows your focus to such a point that you miss opportunities, lose your joy, and forget why you were headed north to begin with.
Movement > Measurement
What if you didn’t start with the destination?
What if you started with the internal pull to move forward whatever that means for you?
If that pull exists if there’s something inside you that wants growth, truth, or forward motion then forget the finish line for a second.
Focus on the habit. The step. The mile. The movement then will just happen and you can walk down stairs.
A thousand-mile journey isn’t a goal. It’s a rhythm. A way of being. I guess we call that a compass or the compass of internal integrity. Now wait. More on that later.
Here’s the truth I’ve come to believe:
You either have a mindset of movement or you don’t.
And if you do… the only thing worth focusing on is the next step.
That’s how real change happens. Not with grand declarations or ten-year plans. But with small, consistent action that remains aware of where you are today and keeps you walking putting one foot in front of the other.
In this series - Walking Downs Stairs that may continue for some time to come, I will explore this concept and my book outline for this idea. I hope you will find this fun, interesting and well….wait for how this connects to real estate.
As we learn to Walk Down the stairs.
Taking One step at a time because it is in us without checking boxes along the way.