One of the questions I most frequently receive from people who’ve just met me and have been observing me for a while is:

How come you handle so much?

Firstly: I handle as much as I handle. To determine whether that’s a lot or a little, one would need to know everything I’m doing at a given moment, and only I know that. Therefore, we should reconcile with the fact that it’s purely subjective perceptions of other people and only we know how much we actually deliver.

However, the key is not how much we deliver, but how we feel about it. While everyone claims that I deliver for 10 people, I myself may be unhappy, feeling that I’m doing too little.

As long as we’re okay with what we’re accomplishing, everything is fine. The problem is that few people are okay with it. At least I am: even though everyone claims that I do a lot, I still demand more from myself. This affects many things I do outside of work. Sometimes I catch myself multitasking and trying to solve a work problem while playing with my kids. I know it’s wrong. But it’s part of who I am. I can work on it, but I can’t and don’t want to deny that it’s part of me. What I’m getting at is that being in harmony with ourselves should be our constant endeavor and it’s what matters most, and along the way we need to accept that not everything always goes perfectly.

This acceptance must come from us and not from others, because only you know exactly what’s going on in your head and whether the tasks you’re carrying out align with your goals. This is also good evidence that we should abandon all that others think about this topic, because they never have a complete view of our goals, methods, and degree of their realization.

You could say it’s a kind of harmony of goals. I usually find out how important it is to respect it when I fail to achieve it. For example, going on vacation when I have unfinished business makes me feel simply bad about myself and I can’t relax. As a result, I come back even more tired than I was, just to finally finish what I previously failed to do. Understanding this phenomenon has allowed me to plan my free time much better and accept that to rest, you have to prepare with proper, conscious action.

I used to think that I could find peace by resolving all the accumulated issues. However, the number of issues is infinite. The only way is to find inner peace by rejecting the concept that all external matters must be resolved.

How to define goals

Realizing that the struggle with goal achievement and the associated feelings occur internally and should be detached from the opinions of others is only half the battle. Equally important is defining goals in such a way that they come from us, not from how we want others to perceive us. This may be obvious to you, but it wasn’t to me. A good example of this is the fact that I completed law studies because the external message suggested that it was a good idea. Maybe if I had known earlier about how to properly select goals in line with my values, I could have saved a lot of time.

The lack of proper goal selection results in a pattern that I’ve repeated for years. It involves getting caught up in a whirlwind of work to achieve something. Then I feel burned out, take a moment to recover, and throw myself into the next whirlwind. Despite everything, with the right dose of motivation and self-discipline, I can move mountains. However, this method turns out to be suboptimal in the context of my health and overall well-being, as well as relationships with loved ones. Over the years, I found it very difficult to enjoy successes or even recognize them. Something that others perceived as a great result, for me at best provided temporary relief that I finally managed to achieve it and could move on to the next thing that had been on my mind for a long time.

I haven’t found a perfect cure for this problem and we have to accept that sometimes it’s just like that. In this light, the perspective of work-life balance is not attractive to me at all. I often managed to work almost non-stop for 2 weeks to achieve one important goal and I (and my environment) learned to feel good about it. It’s important to me to be able to appreciate what I’ve done at the end, not just jump to the next task. From personal experience, I also understood that despite everything, rest during the process is beneficial, which I will write about below.

Authenticity

I also realized that this state of affairs can be significantly improved by choosing goals that are authentic, and then methods of their execution that allow me to enjoy the process itself, not just the result.

What are these authentic goals? They come from asking a few important questions:

• What exactly does success mean to me?
• What do I value in life — what are my values?
• How do I want to feel every day — what gives me satisfaction?

These may seem lofty and existential questions. However, having such a moral code allows me to manage goals and time more effectively and plan what is truly important to me. The answers to these questions helped me understand what is AUTHENTIC for me.

Contrary to appearances, it is not obvious.

There are things that others may judge negatively (e.g., divorce), while in a person’s life it may be the best thing that could happen (e.g., breaking free from a toxic relationship). It took me a long time to understand that certain social norms, even guidelines from our loved ones and parents (e.g., the best course of study) are wrong, as are the harmful values they uphold (e.g., the work ethic as a value in itself, that nothing in life comes easily, that failures always result from mistakes made). I was a person who was constantly busy for years. This constant busyness is like a badge we pin on ourselves and wear proudly, the alternative cost of which is our health — physical and mental, and relationships.

A good test of whether I should really set a particular goal is to ask myself: would I do it if I couldn’t tell anyone about it?

At some point in my life, I simply understood that I should pursue goals that are authentic to me and completely stop worrying about the opinion of others, their criticism of my failures as well as praising my successes. This may not have helped me deliver better, but deliver what actually matters.

Let’s get back to these important questions — based on my answers, you might better understand what I mean.

What does success mean to me exactly?

As much as me and my close family are happy.

Just that. Underneath it hides a lot of things, such as that I am healthy, safe, fulfilled. Underneath feeling safe hides financial security, so maybe the goal will also be the results of my projects. As you can see, digging deeper it’s easy to extract individual goals from such a general statement and then prioritize them over time. It’s possible that once I’m financially free permanently, I’ll be able to cross out the goal of feeling safe. And that’s the point.

However, even such a broadly defined definition of success does a good job for a simple reason: every goal I set in the short term can be checked by reverse engineering with the question: “will delivering it bring me and my loved ones closer to happiness?”

The answer is not always obvious, but getting to it allows me to understand why I do what I do. And this in turn has a huge impact on motivation.

What do I value in life — what are my values?

There are many, but let’s take the most important one: freedom.

To narrow it down to the current context: it’s very easy to filter assumed goals through the prism of whether they meet my definition of freedom, or rather whether the realization of such a goal will be in line with my values.

Some time ago I went to San Francisco to pitch one of my projects. Then I had several meetings with investors and potentially secured high funding. However, the requirement was to move to California. This might be the pinnacle of many entrepreneurs’ dreams. However, for me, it disrupted the foundation of my values: the sense of freedom, and for this reason, I rejected the offer.

If I know that a given goal will bring me closer to my understanding of success, and is also in line with my values, I have even more rational, internal reasons why I should achieve it, especially when I encounter adversity.

How do I want to feel every day — what gives me satisfaction?

I want to be in a state of flow as often as possible.

This is the state in which Leo Messi is during a free kick. He probably doesn’t hear the audience then and thinks about nothing else but scoring a goal. He identifies with the goal to such an extent that he becomes one with it. This state causes us to ignore the passage of time, and the accompanying dopamine makes us feel satisfied being in the process itself, not just after its completion.

Once research was done on a group of IT managers, which showed that their average attention span was 3 minutes. I had exactly the same. The number of distractors determined that at the end of the day when asked what I did today, I couldn’t answer (and I felt tired). The average energy cost of switching context is 20 minutes, even if you just look at a notification. The moment I blocked myself 1.5 hours for work without distractors, I started to enter the state of focus and deliver results much easier.

I love flow. Not only related to work, but also play, sports and generally spending free time in an interesting way. That’s why I want to stay in this state as long as possible. Well-set goals, but also a conscious and planned way of achieving them, make it easy to find yourself in it.

Additionally, to bring truly unique value to the world, you need an obsession, which can sometimes be identified with the state of flow. Delivering at the highest level requires flow.

You could say that being in a state of flow is a significant hint as to whether I have skillfully set a goal for myself that is authentic.

At this point, I need to make one important caveat. I mentioned overarching goals and values like happiness and freedom. Striving for something is a contract I make with myself. This means that I agree to sometimes be unhappy along the way, but achieving the goal will give me satisfaction and in the long term will bring me closer to my definition of success. The same applies to values such as freedom. If building a project would require me to make several trips to California, I am willing to accept such a trade-off. However, if taking funding would mean having to cooperate with investors in making decisions and permanently moving to San Francisco, this is a significant violation of this value.

The realization of every assumption involves the fact that we will have to temporarily sacrifice some of our values for the greater good. But even more often, we will have to do things along the way that we don’t particularly like and this is completely normal. Key for me was understanding the following relationship:

How much time during the day I spend doing things I have to do, versus those that actually interest me.

From the perspective of delivery, this seems key to me for a simple reason. I once heard of a theory in which motivation is a depleted resource and for me such reasoning just works. If we set a goal that is very distant, there is a high risk that just thinking about its realization will not provide us with enough motivation on a daily basis to overcome boring tasks.

Journey versus goal

Let’s assume that reaching the goal requires performing 1000 tasks. Each task that interests us adds 5 points of motivation, and each one that we simply have to do takes away 5 points of motivation. Awareness of the goal itself gives us a starting credit of 100 points of motivation. We have to take care of the rest along the way. If we only perform tasks that we have to force ourselves to do, the credit will quickly run out. There are goals that give us more motivation in themselves: for example, “I have to earn money for an apartment rental to move out of my parents’ house” had an infinite credit of motivation points for me, considering the jobs I was undertaking at the time. But this balance always exists and it is crucial to be able to consciously evaluate it.

The fewer existential, critical needs we have, the more important it becomes to set goals, the pursuit of which will be conditioned by a series of activities that interest us and add points of motivation.

I came to the conclusion that over time the journey becomes much more important than the goal. It took me years to reach this conclusion. Which doesn’t mean that I wasn’t aware of it earlier. On the contrary. I heard it from everyone who achieved something and read it in every major book in my life. However, it turns out that this is one of those things in the category of “easy for you to say” and you just have to come to it yourself. Partly by doing those harder tasks to achieve critical, existential goals.

What I unfortunately understood too late is the fact that until a certain time, my primary goal (success) in life was to find the people who need me the most and projects in which I have the biggest advantages. This is about things that performing for others is work, and for me — pleasure (most of the time). Building goals based on what others are doing and striving for is a mistake. Also for this reason, all universal guides or success stories don’t matter much.

This also means that you have to often return to the key questions and redefine them. The beginning of the year is a good occasion for this. It may turn out that our values have changed, which is completely normal, but without revision, we can fall into the trap of feeling that something is wrong. A good example is material goals, which often evolve over time. For example, buying a Lambo may seem like a great goal, but most people, with age, simply come to the conclusion that it is not in line with their values.

Habits Instead of Goals

I’ve also outlined the problem of perspective. Whether I feel satisfaction comes from performing current tasks, not from the fact that I’ve moved a hundredth of a percent closer to, most often distant, goal.

That’s why, instead of focusing on goals, I prefer to create habits that will bring me closer to them.

Among top athletes, a characteristic that they all share was studied — the so-called hyperfocus. It’s about the fact that the best ones focus on one important thing, eliminating all distractions. But it’s not about winning an Olympic medal in 2 years but rather running the nearest 200 meters in training. It’s about focusing fully on the nearest thing that will bring us closer to a distant goal.

Why habits are important, I understood reading this quote:

At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.

In some studies, I read that if I really don’t want to do something, I should try to focus for a few seconds on some distant object and then switch to action. I don’t know why, but it works. Currently in such situations, I choose one of two things: sport, because usually it’s enough to make a decision, put on shoes and you can go for a run (when I come back, I have a lot of energy and time spent on running or walking is never wasted) or this technique, to narrow the focus, release a bit of dopamine and overcome the crisis.

If I have a larger personal goal, for example related to health, I always try to turn it into a habit. After some time, I evaluate whether a given habit effectively brings me closer to the goal, and if not, I calibrate it. However, I never judge myself. I also don’t expect to always be able to implement a given habit. I believe that this is not effective and only leads to feelings of guilt. I treat habits like projects, the implementation of which I planned — if I don’t get the right result from them, I try to pivot them.

Habits have one magical feature — once ingrained in our system, they are incredibly effective. Building them has been helped by the book Atomic Habits, as well as Andrew Huberman’s podcast. Effective habit building requires persistence, but the results are spectacular. Currently, as soon as the thought “I don’t feel like it” appears in my head, the next thought jumps in automatically: sport, or narrow focus. This is because I managed to develop such a habit. I also discovered that if you systematically work on instilling the right habits, shaping the next ones is much easier. We kind of create a habit of shaping new habits (or getting rid of harmful ones).