This is the continuation of my previous article, where we started to discover the concept of goal setting from various angles, because it’s not as easy as it might seem. We all know what goals are for; we use them, but a lot of times they just don’t work. So in this series of articles, I’m trying to extract my thought process around goals and how I approach them. The beginning of that is here, read it first: https://anticodeguy.com/articles/why-most-goal-setting-advice-fails-and-the-neuroscience-backed-framework-that-actually-works-part-1/.
The Flow State of Goal Pursuit
Let’s examine what goals actually do and why we’re even analyzing all of this. Because again, goals are this thing everyone talks about, but they don’t quite explain what they’re for. They say, if you don’t have a goal, there’s no point doing anything. But actually, that’s not true. However, a goal is something that very effectively sets the direction of movement.
What’s its meaning? Its meaning is that if you have this picture that you see before you, that you imagine, that you’ve rationalized for yourself emotionally or logically or both ways – for you this becomes the answer to the question: why am I doing exactly these actions and not others? Why am I acting exactly this way and not otherwise?
That is, a goal is such a guiding star or lighthouse that allows you to direct your actions one way or another. What does this mean?
When you make decisions – remember the decision-making system, even at this lowest level – the everyday decisions we make, say, when deciding what to eat for breakfast. If you don’t have a goal related to what food you put in your body, then it’ll be whatever’s in the fridge and what I can, for example, cook, what I can make faster or according to my desire.
If you have this picture about exercising, about an athletic figure, then breakfast will contain, for example, a large amount of protein, won’t contain carbs, or whatever else athletes do – I’m not an expert in this, if this is familiar to you, you know better than me.
Goals Direct Decisions
That is, this decision will be backed by that very vision you have, or that very goal. And here’s where that same aspect surfaces again – if this goal is real, authentic, constantly spinning in your background, then the decisions you make will be reinforced from this point of view by it. Or if not, if this goal isn’t important to you, if it doesn’t come to the forefront, then your brain will make a decision to go the path of least resistance – what’s simpler, what’s faster, what’s safer from the brain’s point of view.
Because the brain always strives for safety – it’s its natural evolutionary instinctive function, and staying in the comfort zone is instinctively safe, so this will be striving number one.
According to goal-setting theory developed by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, specific, challenging goals direct attention and effort toward goal-relevant activities. Essentially, a salient goal filters your choices. In their research spanning 35 years with more than 40,000 participants across eight countries, they found that specific, difficult goals consistently outperform vague “do your best” instructions, with effect sizes ranging from d = 0.42 to 0.80.
That’s a dramatic difference in performance and achievement.
Goals as Automatic Decision Filters
And correspondingly, all actions that lead to violation of this comfort zone, where it’s unsafe for it to be, will be rejected if you don’t have this reinforcement that allows you to pull the blanket to your side. This is what a goal actually is. For a very long time I lacked this explanation, because for me a goal was some kind of thing I wrote on paper and then forgot about.
If it doesn’t have this internal reinforcement using those aspects of the brain that can actually influence my behavior, then this goal is absolutely useless – it really just appears as an inscription on a piece of paper.
Now, why is it important to write it down or not write it down – actually here it’s just a technique that helps you explain it one way or another. Because I noticed that for me, for example, writing down the goal doesn’t really work that much, and what works is the deep explanation and rationalization of the reason.
That if I understand why I’m doing this emotionally and rationally, then I don’t necessarily need to write it down – I already have this deposited deep in my brain’s subcortex, and I won’t need to invent justifications for my actions. I already have this understanding of why I’m doing it and how I need to direct my actions.
Know How You Think
But this very strongly depends on how your thinking is structured, because for someone it depends on what state your brain is in, your thinking is in. Because if, say, it’s very heavily packed with many layers of other things that don’t allow you to remember in time, for example in the moment, that you have some big guiding star, or something blocks your vision, obscures it with such fog or makes it blurry – then naturally this will lead to this layering outweighing your goal, it won’t be visible to you. You need to wipe this windshield that’s now covered with snow or flooded with water that just blocks all visibility.
And for many people, very useful tools are precisely such things as writing down the goal and, for example, visualizing it. That is, building a picture, for example a mood board or vision board – a board of your vision that shows various aspects of, for example, your goal that was set, and basically reflects that very target vision.
But the writing works because it forces articulation. It makes you clarify your “why” and your “what.” For people whose brains are cluttered with competing priorities, external reminders serve a critical function. For people like me whose rational chains stay firmly embedded, writing becomes optional – though still potentially useful.
The point is this: find the method that keeps your authentic goal active in your decision-making process.
- For some that’s daily journal review.
- For others it’s visual reminders.
- For still others it’s a robust logical framework that needs no external prompting.
There’s no universal approach. The only requirement is that your method keeps the goal from being buried under the mental noise of daily life.
The Foundation Is Everything
Let me bring this back to where we started (with the previous article). Goals feel artificial and synthetic when they lack foundation. And that foundation consists of three elements:
- Psychological readiness. The genuine desire to change combined with the willingness to question your current state. Without both, goal-setting is intellectual masturbation – interesting to think about but pointless.
- Authentic motivation. The goal must be genuinely yours, connected to your actual internal drivers (health, wealth, relationships, happiness, spirituality), not borrowed from someone else’s highlight reel. As the West Point study showed, external motivations not only fail to help – they can actively undermine your internal drive.
- Internalization through your cognitive style. Whether through emotional anchoring, rational chains, visual reminders, or some combination – you must process the goal in a way that makes it feel inevitable and obvious to your particular brain.
When all three elements align, goal-setting stops being a forced exercise and becomes almost automatic. The goal flows naturally from your justified need. Writing it down becomes optional because you already have deep understanding of why you’re pursuing it.
And this is when goals actually start working. Not because you’re using the right productivity app or the perfect vision board template. But because the goal is authentically yours, backed by both readiness and rationalization, processed in a way your specific brain accepts.
Most goal-setting advice skips straight to tactics – SMART goals, tracking systems, accountability partners. All of that can be useful. But without the foundation, it’s just sophisticated procrastination. You’re building a house on sand.
As Edward Deci put it:
“A deep personal desire to change must come first. Then perhaps, a technique can give a little help”.
What Comes Next
We’ve established the foundation – the prerequisites, the authenticity requirement, the internalization process. You now understand why most goals fail before they even begin. They lack psychological readiness, they’re borrowed rather than authentic, or they’re never properly internalized through the person’s natural cognitive style.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
Even authentic goals need architecture. They need both rational justification AND emotional power. Emotion alone fades when the initial spike wears off. Logic alone feels sterile and fails to activate approach motivation. You need both, working together, creating that two-way reinforcement.
In the next article, we’ll explore why emotion-driven goals collapse after the initial excitement wears off. Why purely logical goals get rationalized away when things get difficult. And how to build the motivation architecture that combines both into something unstoppable.
We’ll examine the neuroscience of how dopamine actually works in goal pursuit (hint: it’s not what most people think). We’ll look at why some personality types need completely different approaches to rationalization. And I’ll share the specific process I use to build logical chains so robust that my analytical brain can’t find excuses to quit.
The foundation you’ve built here is critical. But foundation alone doesn’t build the house. That comes next.