Maybe landing among the stars isn't so great

It's getting close to the end of the year and, for many people, it's goal-setting time for the new year. While I typically set annual goals casually, I didn't set any for 2024 — I was too exhausted from work during the transition into the new year.

At one of the places I've worked at before, setting ambitious goals that were too ambitious was encouraged: something something you'll land amongst the stars. In hindsight that's just ridiculous in the context of work: only those with the most authority got to pat themselves on their backs for having "tried" their best, everyone else gets to take the responsibility for not meeting goals that they didn't even set themselves.

Let's ask ourselves a few questions:

• Who really gets to set goals?
• Once goals are set, who actually does the work to deliver on them?
• Who gets to decide if the goals are met?
• Who takes responsibility when goals are not met?
• Whose performance review is affected by met and unmet goals?

If those questions don't make you uncomfortable then you're working at a place with a genuinely good culture, lying to yourself, or you are a sociopath.

Setting unrealistic, ambitious goals is literally setting yourself up for failure, and nobody benefits from them in the long run. It's just like the famous quote "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you land among the stars": it sounds great and romantic, but if you really think about the reality of landing among the stars (where exactly is that anyway?), maybe it's not so great.