Goals Are Good, Actually
how I hit the 1,000 pound club after years of half-assing
I finally joined the 1000 Pound Club. For the uninitiated, this isn't an exclusive membership organization. It’s a weightlifting milestone when your one rep max in bench press, squat, and deadlift total to at least 1000 pounds. It’s an arbitrary threshold that’s impressive to casual gym-goers but merely expected for serious lifters. While I'm proud of reaching this marker, the satisfaction runs deeper than physical accomplishment. This is about finally honoring a commitment I'd made to myself years ago.
The 1000 Pound Club has haunted me since high school. As a freshman first touching barbells, I repeatedly told myself that someday I’d hit it. That “someday” stretched into years with a rotating cast of reasonable excuses. Every winter means ski season, relegating lifting to maintenance mode. Living via sublet to sublet made consistent training complicated even though I always found access to a gym. Eventually, this unfulfilled pursuit started to nag at me like an unpaid debt. I considered myself reliable and determined, but this one incomplete self-imposed goal continued to sit in my subconscious, whispering quips of self-doubt to me.
After years of half-assed effort and going through the motions, I decided to actually dedicate myself fully. This wasn’t a public performance. There was no marathon bib, Instagram transformation post, and I don’t even have videographic proof that I did it. Just me proving something to myself. The evidence of my prolonged procrastination exists in the form of an unchecked reminder “Look up powerlifting program to get to 1k club”, dated “3/19/24” in red text indicating it's been long overdue.
Earlier this year, after traveling through Asia in February and wrapping up the ski season, I finally confronted this lingering goal. No more excuses about travel or seasonal shifts. I was ready to hit the 1000 Pound Club. The commitment itself proved more challenging than an intense workout at RPE1 9. Physically moving iron is straightforward. Our ancestors have been lifting heavy objects since the caveman era. The real challenge was confronting years of self-deception, revealing the gap between who I claimed I could be and who my actions revealed.
For most of my life I have been a goal-oriented achiever. The dopamine rush of getting a gold star in kindergarten translated into consistently chasing straight As. Each 100/100 or A+ reinforced my identity as someone who completes things. Any missed points or incorrect answers triggered immediately going into self-improvement mode to analyze and correct. That was just in the classroom. In sports, whether it was basketball or soccer, I was acutely aware of the scoreboard. In these games, it was always clear what the objective was, and I became a machine of goal-setting and goal-accomplishing.
Then came my sabbatical, a deliberate dismantling of this achievement machinery. I had to unlearn the rigid goal-setting adherence that once got me praise, progress, and pride. I stepped into the unknown without any future-oriented outcomes, learning to navigate by intuition rather than objectives. I immersed myself in a philosophy of process over goals, reading about the virtues of goalless exploration from indie bloggers and self-help authors advocating this approach. While this liberation from goals brought necessary healing, I eventually discovered its limits. Complete goallessness across all domains left me adrift, passively waiting for life to happen instead of creating forward momentum.
The way I see it, sometimes goals have their place. In the right context, a clear, measurable objective becomes a powerful tool rather than a burden. My approach to lifting went from casual sessions based on what “felt right” to structured programming with progressive overload and periodization. I showed up consistently, regardless of motivation levels or how my body felt that day. Maybe I would’ve eventually hit the 1000 Pound Club without deliberate intention, but I think it’s unlikely. Committing to the goal itself became the bridge that carried me across.
The value of goals hinges on their context and intention. Pursuing external markers of success can trap you in a half-century long quest toward the wrong horizon, before waking up at 50, filthy rich yet completely empty. But self-authored goals offer a different trajectory. Clear paths of dedication and diligence can lead to effective change without inauthentic distortion. We contain multitudes, and different seasons and areas of life call for different approaches. Some benefit from strong structure while others need fluid spaciousness. The wisdom lies in discernment: knowing when to set a goal, and when not to. When properly applied, goals provide the scaffolding for us to transcend our self-limiting beliefs and ingrained patterns.
The Case Against Goal-Setting
We’ve been conditioned to chase targets from childhood. From standardized testing to literal goals in peewee soccer, we were taught that hitting goals was praised and rewarded. This formula works reliably through education and early career. While studying EECS at UC Berkeley, my most driven classmates zoomed through coursework into accelerated careers. Now in their late 20s, they’ve already reached director-level engineering positions, staff product roles, partner-level in VC, or founded their own companies. They appear satisfied with their trajectories, as they should be. Their achievement-oriented paths provided substantial safety nets to be able to apply leverage and take bigger risks, which is a genuine privilege.
But increasingly, I notice people diverging from these linear paths. Like a river delta splitting into countless tributaries, formerly single-track careers branch into unexpected territories.
I know a Google engineer moonlighting as a DJ who migrated from Singapore to NYC. An IT specialist who left tech to pursue comedy alongside Jake Paul. A lawyer splitting time between high-billing corporate work and fulfilling therapist training. A software engineer on sabbatical running underground bakery pop-ups. A wealthy post-exit founder searching for meaning beyond status competitions with peers. These aren’t hypothetical cases. These are real people I know navigating complex relationships with work, achievement, and purpose.
Major life milestones often catalyze further self-inquiry. I’ve noticed friends who recently got engaged or married naturally steering towards deeper reflections with their career. Perhaps having answered “who will I be with?”, they inevitably confront “what should I be doing with my life?”
As we grow up and wake up2, we’re exposed to more possibilities and external disruptions. The pandemic shattered our perception of what’s normal, made remote work the default, and gave people a new ideal workweek (not commuting to the office 5 days a week). When world leaders can snap their fingers to create geopolitical and economic shockwaves that result in layoffs and hiring freezes, and anyone can get lucky at winning the attention algorithm game on TikTok, it can be difficult to adhere to the rinse and repeat method of goal-setting.
Goal-setting works effectively in two specific contexts: aligning a team together towards a shared mission and achievement that can be done simply and linearly. Companies and sports teams benefit from shared objectives. Individual skills with clear progression paths, like weightlifting, also respond well to targeted goals.
But goals falter in complex domains with multiple variables and multiple players. Career trajectories and relationships resist this approach. Declaring "I'll secure job X by date Y" often backfires (I tried this recently and watched it implode.) Similarly, setting a dating OKR of finding your true love by Q3 also doesn’t work. As environments grow more complex and unpredictable, strategies must shift from rigid goal-setting to adaptive processing and responsive awareness.
When Goals Work
Goals thrive in simple, linear domains with self-contained feedback loops. Physical fitness is a great example with measurable progress and predictable improvement patterns. There were plenty of fitness goals to choose from, but for me, the 1000 Pound Club felt appealing. It’s a benchmark of strength with its binary clarity whereas a marathon has finish times, creating additional complexity. As I navigate my current season of uncertainty, this concrete goal kept me anchored and prevented aimless drifting.
I began training on March 20th with a decent baseline of 225x5 on bench, 250x5 on squat, and 315x5 on deadlift. With months of skiing and traveling, I hadn’t lifted consistently, and I also hadn’t tested my one rep max in years. My full potential remained a mystery.
I considered hiring a virtual strength coach to help me with programming, but I decided to go the DIY route and partner with Claude. First, I prompted it to generate a meta-prompt to synthesize multiple powerlifting methodologies. Then I fed it my preferences like how many training days per week, when I wanted rest days, and my target completion date. We also covered everything from warm-up protocols to nutrition to equipment recommendations. For these, I didn’t learn anything revolutionary, but at least it validated my existing approach even if it’s been mostly casually tossing around weight at the gym.
The bulk of my training happened in April while living on the Upper West Side. I found Strength Society, a local gym with the right vibes, unlike Planet Fitness with its heavy lifting bans and pizza parties. To eliminate friction, I created a Notion workout tracker and added a widget to my homescreen. The program I co-created with Claude was pretty solid with consistent progression and well-timed deload weeks.
My original plan targeted June 2nd for testing all three lifts, just before a five-day therapy training in Asheville where lifting would be inaccessible. But physical reality intervened. My left pec developed persistent tightness (not sharp pain, but concerning enough to research potential tears online.) After a couple weeks without improvement despite reduced intensity, I decided to just go for it. On May 1st, at a suburban Bay Area 24 Hour Fitness, I progressively increased my bench weight until hitting 285 pounds. I might’ve had enough juice to hit 295, but having reached my target range of 275-285, I played it safe. Adding wrist wraps mid-way helped provide support, and so did asking a stronger dude for a spot. His encouragement pushed me past what I would’ve attempted alone. Sometimes we dwell in our world of standards and thresholds that we need others to help raise the bar for us.
A few days later came deadlift day. I warmed up, started with one plate on each side, and quickly ramped up to 405. Seeing four plates on either side for the first time was a satisfying sight, but it wouldn’t mean shit unless it came off the ground. After hitting 405, I attempted 425. Whether from inadequate sleep or incomplete recovery, the heavier weight wouldn't budge. I dropped to 415, rested my central nervous system, and then lifted it..
With an upcoming retreat with vegetarian meals and glamping accommodations, I was confronted with the decision of whether to finish the project before I left or to wait until I got back. I didn’t want to take the chance that I’d return somehow with less strength and frankly, I just wanted to get the damn thing over with so I could stop LARPing as a powerlifter.
On May 7th, the day before driving up to Mendocino’s redwoods, I decided to go for it. By coincidence, the same guy who spotted me on bench was deadlifting next to me. With the confidence of my consistent training and a Starbucks caffeine boost, I squatted three plates on either side. The 315 squat meant my total reached 1015 pounds, exceeding my goal by the weight of a 6-month old baby.
Going into this, I precisely prompted and crafted a training plan with weight, sets, and reps dialed in for each workout. Initially, I needed Claude's programmed structure as external scaffolding for discipline. But eventually, I developed enough embodied knowledge to trust my own judgment and abandon the prescribed timeline.
I felt a sense of satisfaction that I had hit my goal. This was entirely self-driven. My mom was supportive but ambivalent. My girlfriend gently explained to me that brute strength isn’t actually the aphrodisiac that men imagine it to be. My powerlifter friend kept me in check, reminding me I was still weak by serious standards. Nobody particularly cared, which was good because that meant I could harvest all the glory for myself.
Setting Goals While In Transition
I’ve navigated countless transitions, including geographic relocations, career pivots, sabbaticals–and I’m currently in one right now. With roughly half my coaching clients also navigating work-life transitions, studying the psychology of transitions has become a central focus of my practice.
Common transition pitfalls come up repeatedly. The urgency to solve the money problem instead of sitting with uncertainty. The reflexive pursuit of external “shoulds” over authentic “wants”. The default to frantic busyness over genuine curiosity. And particularly relevant here: setting rigid deadline-driven goals when flexibility and spaciousness is needed most.
Transitions by nature involve complex, nonlinear environments saturated with uncertainty. When the path forward requires expanding possibilities rather than narrowing them, goals can become counterproductive distractions. The research-backed book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned demonstrates how singular objective pursuit can actually prevent novel discovery and optimal outcomes. Similarly, The Pathless Path offers an intimate perspective for navigating uncertainty without predetermined destinations. In place of goals, I consider what I provocatively call Chainsmoking Good Days–identifying your version of a satisfying day and living one at a time without future fixation.
Remember how we learned "Stop, Drop, and Roll" for fires? Transitions deserve their own protocol: "Pause, Sense, Discern." When forward movement feels unclear, first pause to create clarity before impulsively acting. Then sense using your full perceptive capacity, not just rational thinking. Finally, discern whether the situation requires structured goals or a more experimental approach of wandering, trying, or simply waiting.
Transitions often require releasing goals prescribed by external voices that no longer resonate. The untethering from familiar benchmarks can feel really destabilizing. But abandoning artificial goals doesn't mean abandoning all structure. I'm not suggesting you stop brushing your teeth. Instead, notice what emerges in the space you’ve created. Ancient wisdom affirms that emptiness often precedes unexpected emergence. Realities that could not have been predicted or conceived of become possible.
Even with intellectual understanding, letting go of goals remains challenging. The disorientation can feel lonely, like an abandoned astronaut floating in outer space. Here's my counterintuitive recommendation: while navigating major transitions, set a clear goal in a secondary life domain. In my case, I chose a fitness goal for myself. While activities like cultivating mindfulness and developing self-awareness will help with being in uncertainty, I’ve found that partially taking your mind off of “The Main Thing” provides surprising relief. Since I was already spending consistent gym time, pursuing the 1000 Pound Club required no additional resources (except temporarily setting aside running).
So if you’re going through a transition or feeling a bit lost in life, consider committing to an exciting goal in a different domain. Something measurable, achievable, and personally meaningful. At minimum, you'll gain productive distraction from existential discomfort. At best, you’ll make continuous progress, savor the satisfaction of achieving your goal, and develop the vital capacity to honor commitments to yourself, a skill that will serve you long after this transition ends.
So… what goal are you ready to commit to?3
P.S. I’m taking a few weeks to chill out while I travel before I commit to a new goal :)
Rate of Perceived Exertion: a subjective scale used to measure the intensity of your exercise based on how hard it feels to you, rather than using heart rate or wattage.
A reference to Ken Wilbur’s framework of Grow Up, Clean Up, Wake Up, and Show Up
This blog was written during a cross-country flight while listening to We Are The People - ARBAT Remix on repeat and then edited on a makeshift standing desk at midnight in terminal 5 of JFK airport.
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