I Don't Set Goals.

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead the way they always do in rooms that aren’t designed for anyone to enjoy existing in.

My youngest sister’s “quick paintings”.

Fold-up tables. Plastic chairs. A PowerPoint glowing on a screen at the front of the room… clean, corporate, full of words like vision and trajectory and measurable outcomes. The guy teaching the seminar was in his mid-thirties, buttoned shirt and hair gelled into a crisp wave atop his head. A CEO - poignant and confident - genuinely trying to help us. I was about a year and a half out of college, sitting in a leadership seminar, pen in hand, college-ruled paper in front of me.

He gave us the exercise: five goals. For each goal: three ways you’ll achieve it. Something you can do today, something weekly, something monthly.

Around me, pens hit paper immediately. I could hear them… that particular scratching sound of people who know exactly what they want to say. Heads down, this collective excited energy filling the room like everyone had been waiting for exactly this moment to finally get it all down.

I glanced back at my page.

Nothing.

Not a scratch, a scribble… not a word. Just a blank sheet of college-ruled paper and the particular horror of being the only person in a room who appears to have no idea where they’re going.

And that wee little voice crept in right on schedule. You’re not thoughtful enough. You don’t have a plan. Everyone else has already figured this out and you are sitting here with… nothing.

Eventually I wrote something down. Something about taking on more responsibility at work. I don’t even remember… I’m sure it was something that sounded like a goal the way an ai generated answer sounds eloquent, technically correct yet completely hollow.

When we went around the room to share, I said my thing and felt nothing. No spark. No direction. If anything, staring at those words on the page gave me a low-grade ick I couldn’t quite place.

I drove home that afternoon with a quiet, unsettling question sitting in my chest.

What is wrong with me?

Nothing, as it turns out. But it took a while to get there.

I was sitting in my therapist’s office recently when the topic of goal setting came up.

My sister, Bria, and the rescue horse she trained from scratch - the horse that launched her career in the equine world, Martini.

That familiar resistance kicked in immediately. Not avoidance. Not laziness. Just a deep, quiet no rising somewhere in my chest before my brain had even rationalized it.

Which is strange, honestly. I am not a person who avoids a challenge. I come from a family where high achievement is the standard. Both of my parents went to Stanford. My siblings are (and I say this with complete sincerity and only a little bit of competitive energy) an absolutely unreasonable group of people. One is working toward the Olympics for rugby while simultaneously studying mechanical engineering at UCSB. One just got accepted into Cornell’s architecture program AND Stanford’s summer program. One has been running her own independent business and attending UC Davis at the same time. One is at a respected AE firm with her master’s from Cal Poly SLO. And my youngest is somehow the cornerstone of our entire family while producing the most stunning artwork I’ve ever seen.

I am not unfamiliar with high expectations. Goals and I have a long history.

So why do they make me want to take off in the opposite direction?

Graduation day, my sister Joelle sitting amongst her Architectural Engineering Peers. That SMILE!!

My therapist framed it this way: goals are not necessarily the driving factor of success.

Huh…?

Goals are NOT the driving factor of success. Not for me.

For certain people, high achieving, high pressure, already-demanding-a-lot-of-themselves people, goals can actually generate more anxiety than momentum. The pressure of the end product becomes the thing that gets in the way of the work itself.

Something about that clicked for me.

When I look back at everything I’ve actually accomplished, in school, in training, in my career so far, I can’t point to a single goal that was the thing that carried me there. What I can point to, every single time, is a system. A process. A structure I built and then trusted enough to show up for consistently.

That’s what moved me forward. Every time.

The gym taught me this before I had words for it.

For all five years of college I was there six days a week. Anywhere from an hour to three hours of training depending on the day. People would ask what my lifting goal was… what number I was chasing, what milestone I was building toward.

I never had a good answer. Which confused people.

What drove me wasn’t the destination. It was the regimen. Showing up. Moving through the program. Adding a little weight each session. The process of getting stronger was what kept me coming back, not some number written on a piece of paper.

The consistency was the goal. And the consistency worked.

Right now, Drawn Outside is in its infancy. I genuinely don’t know what I’ll accomplish in the next week, the next month, the next year. There’s too much unknown to set a meaningful five-year goal with any real confidence.

But here’s what I do know.

I can post three times a week. I can write a blog every week. I can show up to design events in Tucson and meet people. I can respond to everyone who engages with my content. I can keep producing excellent work and keep asking myself how to get better at it.

Those are my goals. They live inside the process.

That feels right to me in a way that a revenue target or a client count never has. Because if the system works, and I believe it will, the outcomes will follow. You don’t have to obsess over the destination if you’ve built a road worth walking.

My therapist framed it as a values question. I think he’s right.

Some people are genuinely motivated by outcomes. By the achievement itself. By being able to point to what they’ve built and measure it. That’s real, and it works for a lot of people, and I’m not here to tell anyone their motivational framework is wrong.

My sister, Jayna, kicking ass as always. Her and her team are killing it this season - heading to the NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS.

But that’s not me.

What I value is self-discipline. Consistency. The quality of my thinking. The strength of my systems. The ability to build something sustainable, not just something impressive on paper.

I don’t feel much when I accomplish a goal. I check the box and move immediately to the next thing. What genuinely excites me is preparing for something. Building the infrastructure. Designing the process that’s going to make the outcome possible.

That’s where I feel alive.

I still think about that seminar sometimes. About sitting in that plastic chair under those humming lights, pen frozen over a blank page, everyone around me writing furiously while I had absolutely nothing.

For a long time I read that moment as evidence of a deficit. A sign that I lacked direction, drive, clarity of purpose.

Now I read it differently.

One of my brother’s EARLY architectural renderings. All accurate to the time period, history, and culture (of course).

I wasn’t stuck because I didn’t know where I was going. I was stuck because goals, goals written on a page, measured in milestones, mapped out in neat little rows, have never been the thing that moves me. I needed a different question entirely. Not “what do you want to achieve” but “what system are you willing to show up for”.

That question I could have answered in seconds.

I spend a lot of time watching content from people telling young professionals exactly what they need to do to be successful. Set your daily goals. Your weekly goals. Your monthly, yearly, five-year, ten-year goals. If you don’t have a plan, you don’t have a future.

Most of that advice is someone speaking from their own experience and calling it universal truth.

It isn’t.

If goal-setting lights you up and gives you direction, use it. Really. It’s a real tool and it works for a lot of people.

But if you’re like me, if you feel that quiet resistance, if you’ve always been more energized by the process than the prize, if you accomplish things and move on without much fanfare… you are not broken. You are not unmotivated. You are not going to fail because you can’t make yourself care about a five-year plan.

You just know what actually drives you.

Knowing that about yourself isn’t a liability.

It’s self-awareness. And self-awareness, in my experience, is one of the most powerful things a person can build.

Are you a goal-setter, or someone who runs on systems and process? And have you ever been made to feel like the way your brain works is somehow the wrong way?