When setting goals triggers an existential crisis
If setting goals sucks you into an existential vacuum of despair, try asking yourself these two simple questions instead.
Every semester I conduct a Town Hall to reconnect with all of my Arnold Academy students to better understand their current needs and circumstances. In our latest Town Hall, one of our discussion points was the GOALS question from the GO FAR framework: What do you want to achieve this year? And why?
This candid response basically set the temperature for the entire room:
“My 2025 was so awful...I’m sure I’m not alone in even being able to begin identifying my goals for this year. It’s an existential crisis.“
Given how unpredictable and uncertain both work and life have been since 2020, I’d be hard-pressed to identify a single week in the last five years when I haven’t helped at least one person navigate an existential crisis. (It’s kinda become my thing.)
If you’re struggling to set clear goals for the year ahead, trust me, you’re not alone. My suggestion is to simplify the GOALS question as follows:
What do you want? And what don’t you want?
When you focus exclusively on what you want to “achieve,” this forces you to think deliberately about specific results, for example:
Losing weight
Acquiring more money and more things
Winning awards
Getting a new job
Completing (or winning) a specific race
But setting deliberate goals for the year ahead—especially when you’re unclear about where you want to go in the next phase of your life— can often make you feel like a failure before you even begin. It’s so much easier to just stay “busy” so you have an excuse to not address the existential vacuum you’ve been sucked into. When you focus more simply on what you want and don’t want in your life, however, you have a lot more freedom to set more exploratory goals such as:
I want more control over my time
I don’t want to work every weekend
I want to spend more time outdoors with my partner
I don’t want to miss my kids’ bedtimes
I want to be happier
While you might not be able to break down these exploratory goals into your daily to-do list quite yet, they can serve as the north star that helps you avoid walking through life in circles.
What do we all want?
Ultimately, underneath pretty much everything we want and don’t want is being able to answer ‘yes’ to the following question:
Am I at peace with how I’m spending my time?
Unfortunately, the vast majority of students I work with (and I would venture to guess most of humanity right now) are not at peace with how they’re spending their time. And they think the solution is to want:
more time
more money
less work
more life
We work more in hopes it will buy us more money that will then buy us more time and eventually earn us more life. But as we earn more money in service of more time, we inevitably allow our lifestyles to expand such that we then have to use even more time to acquire even more money to sustain our expanded lifestyle needs...and we inevitably end up with WAY less time working WAY more.
As the resentment, anxiety, and lack of fulfillment for how we are spending our time festers and compounds, we then spend the majority of our waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours to earn even more money to acquire even more things that we don’t have the time to enjoy because we’re working too much in hopes that our new “stuff” will fill the gap between the unhappiness we feel and the peace we so desperately seek.
On the off chance we do escape this vicious cycle and end up with more time to spend on things other than work, we still don’t end up getting healthier, getting organized, or reconnecting with everyone we said we really need to catch up with. Instead we collapse. And we TikTok. Because we no longer have any idea who we are in our lives when we’re not working.
Ask me how I know all of this...
Not only do I help my students navigate the terrifying waters of uncertainty in both work and life every single day, but I too found myself sucked into the existential vacuum at the height of my Hollywood career editing the #1 show on television.
I was overworked, under-appreciated, and exhausted. And when I wasn’t working I was borderline comatose sleeping 12 hours a day or more (I literally slept through an entire family vacation). One because I was burned out, and two because I was too afraid to face the reality I had no idea what my life looked like when I wasn’t working. I was definitely NOT at peace with how I was spending my time.
Had you asked me, “What do you want?” ten years ago, I would have crawled out of my pit of despair just long enough to quietly whisper…”I want more work-life balance.”
But little did I know at the time this dirty little secret…
Work-life balance is bullshit.
I realize this may come as a shock given I’ve spent the last ten years encouraging creatives like yourself to prioritize your health, your well-being, and build an identity beyond the job title on your résumé. But in my endless pursuit for more work-life “balance” I’ve discovered the following:
The pursuit of work-life balance is not only futile, it is also meaningless.
Keep an 👀 on your inbox Friday morning because I’ll be sharing the most important discovery I’ve made in my entire career that has allowed me to be at peace with how I’m spending my time and escape the treadmill of endlessly failing to achieve more “balance” in my life.
In the meantime I’d love to know...
What needs to change for you to feel more at peace with how you are spending your time this year?
🎯 Join the (FREE) 5-Day Focus Challenge
Come join me and my global creative community in The Arnold Academy as we set clear, intentional, and meaningful goals for 2026, eliminate unnecessary distractions, and prioritize what comes next.
P.S. Existential crises are welcome here. 😉
📆 WHEN: Mon, Jan 19th - Fri Jan 23rd
💻 WHERE: The Arnold Academy Circle Community
You can register and join us in 3 simple steps.
Click the link below to create your FREE Circle account (no CC info is required).
(Optional) Fill out your student profile to connect with like-minded peers.
Watch the welcome video to get prepared for the challenge.
"What needs to change for you to feel more at peace with how you are spending your time this year?" – Commitment. The goals are identified, the time blocks are set. Maintaining diligence, sustaining momentum, even when the motivation lags.