Walking Down Stairs Part 1 - #1 Reason Your Goals Fail
Why You Don’t Need to Be a “Goal-Setter” to Move Forward
Why You Don’t Need to Be a “Goal-Setter” to Move Forward
Let me say this upfront: I don’t hate goals. I just don’t think they’re the engine most people believe they are.
We’ve all been taught to set them. Write them down. Make them SMART. 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 system.
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 adjust naturally. You let gravity help you. 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.
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 system to take you somewhere.
Not because there’s a goal. But because there’s movement.
We live in a culture obsessed with outcome. We want measurable progress, quarterly benchmarks, vision boards, proof of success. 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.
They were the small ones. The ordinary ones. The repeatable ones.
Not glamorous. Just grounded.
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.
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.
Or worse: you’ll take some convoluted, rushed, pressure-filled path and miss every beautiful stop along the way.
The goal becomes a blinder. 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
So let’s flip the model.
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 move.
A thousand-mile journey isn’t a goal. It’s a rhythm. A way of being.
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 mile.
That’s how real change happens. Not with grand declarations or ten-year plans. But with small, consistent action that honors where you are—and keeps you walking. I this series of X 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.
Down the stairs.
Through the miles.
One step at a time.