A destination doesn’t require a perfect plan
Most long-term business goals don’t explode in dramatic failure.
They fade.
Goals get written down in a planner, and as your attention moves to task lists and family matters, the planner stops getting opened.
The long-term goal that once made you feel like power posing in public now feels like just another quiet disappointment.
And if you’re like most of us, that disappointment feels personal, even when you know there are plenty of factors beyond your control.
Still, it’s easy to fall into the same old assumption:
If I didn’t achieve my goal, there must be something wrong with me. My drive. My discipline. My ambition.
But that assumption is wrong.
You didn’t fail the goal.
The hard-work-and-hustle framework we’ve been taught to use for long-term goal setting simply isn’t designed for how most businesses, and most lives, actually work.
The myth of the right goal
Research in psychology consistently shows that humans are poor predictors of their future capacity, motivation, and preferences, especially over long time horizons.¹
That makes it particularly unhelpful that we’ve been taught long-term success depends on choosing the right goal.
The goal needs to be big enough to sustain motivation. Clear enough to stay focused. Compelling enough to keep you pushing forward.
SMART goals.
Stretch goals.
Vision board goals.
All of these approaches share the same underlying assumption: that your energy, health, interests, and life circumstances will remain relatively stable over time.
That assumption might hold inside a large organization with distributed responsibility and built-in buffers.
It does not hold inside a solo business run by a human being.
We age.
We get tired.
We get bored.
We get sick.
We change priorities.
We live through market shifts and personal recalibrations.
When a long-term goal is built on an unrealistic premise, no amount of motivation, commitment or hard work will save it.
Long-term goals shouldn’t be built on short-term assumptions
Most long-term goals are created by projecting today’s reality into the future.2 Today’s capacity. Today’s curiosity. Today’s tolerance for pressure. Today’s definition of success.
The result is that we ask a future version of ourselves to live inside assumptions that may no longer fit.
This is one of the reasons experienced entrepreneurs often feel more constrained by their goals than beginners do.
When that happens, it isn’t because experience has reduced their clarity. More often, it’s because they’re working within plans that no longer reflect who they are or how they actually operate.
Adaptability by Design™: A long-term goal framework
Long-term goals don’t quietly collapse because people quit working toward them or wanting the results.
Goals collapse because they were never designed to adapt.
Adaptability by Design™ is a framework for creating goals that can survive reality, not just inspire action.
It rests on three principles.
- Capacity-aware design
Most goals are created as if capacity were infinite.
They ignore:
Physical energy
Mental load
Emotional bandwidth
Financial margin
Capacity is treated like a mindset problem instead of what it actually is: infrastructure.
Inside Flight Plan capacity isn’t a limitation to overcome. It’s a condition to design around.
A goal that requires constant override of your limits isn’t too ambitious, it was never sustainable in the first place.
- Navigation over performance
Many long-term goals are really just outcome targets in disguise.
Revenue numbers, audience size, launch results… Those metrics tell you what happened after the fact. They don’t tell you how to proceed when conditions change.
Performance measures outcomes.
Navigation supports forward movement.
When goals are designed around navigation instead of optics, progress becomes easier to sustain.
- Built-in course correction
This is where most goals quietly turn into judgments.
When reality changes and your plan doesn’t adapt the unaccomplished goal starts to feel like an accusation.
Instead of revising your goal, you avoid it.
A goal that can’t be adjusted becomes a source of shame instead of a directional tool.
Adaptability by Design assumes course correction from the start. Not as a failure. As a feature.
Some of the most meaningful long-term goals don’t begin as plans, they begin as a direction. A personal example may clarify what this looks like in practice.
Since I was a little girl, I wanted to live in France and for most of my adult life it was a background desire, not a formal goal.
Living in France wasn’t something I planned around or structured my life to achieve. That changed in October 2023 after my 32-year marriage ended. What had been a vague “some day” became a very real destination.
But, the route has changed repeatedly. Financial timelines shifted. Administrative requirements evolved. Some paths got blocked while others opened unexpectedly.
At no point did the destination stop making sense. But, nearly every assumption about how to get there did.
If my goal to move to France had been designed as a rigid performance-based plan, complete with fixed and non-negotiable milestones, I would have been forced to choose between pushing past my capacity or abandoning the goal entirely.
Instead, the goal was designed to adapt.
The destination remained steady and clear. The route changed and my pace adjusted
That’s the difference between commitment and rigidity and it’s exactly what Adaptability by Design is meant to support.
Why motivation isn’t the solution
Motivation is episodic. It waxes and wanes with energy, mood, and the challenges of day-to-day life.
Long-term goals are meant to outlast enthusiasm, novelty, and your personal willpower.
They must survive boredom, uncertainty, and seasons of life where progress is slow or invisible.
Long-term goals don’t need more motivation. They need better design.
What changes when goals are designed to adapt
When long-term goals are built with adaptability in mind, pressure to perform decreases, decisions clarify, urgency softens, and momentum becomes steadier.
The goal stops acting like a demand and starts acting like a compass.
This is the foundation of how I teach planning inside Flight Plan: not as performance optimization, but as intelligent navigation.
A better question to ask
Before committing to a long-term goal, ask:
“Will this still make sense if I am tired, distracted, or living a different life than I imagine right now?”
If the answer is no, the goal isn’t adaptable, it’s fragile and it probably won’t survive the challenges of daily life.
Adaptability by Design is not about lowering standards or avoiding growth. It’s about building goals that don’t require self-betrayal to maintain.
In future posts, I’ll go deeper into how navigation-based planning works and how to design goals that can evolve without collapsing.
References
¹ Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2007). Prospection: Experiencing the future. Science, 317(5843), 1351–1354.
2 Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures. Studies in the Management Sciences, 12, 313–327.
Resources
Hershfield, H. E., et al. (2011). Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of Marketing Research, 48(SPL), S23–S37.
Baumeister, R. F., et al. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265.
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
Duckworth, A. L., et al. (2011). Self-control and grit. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(6), 1061–1082.