How to be productive without overwhelm or feeling stressed

This is a controversial take in the self-improvement space, but I'm not a huge believer in setting really clear goals. I personally do not spend a lot of time thinking in meticulous details about my goals like I'm supposed to. And to be honest with you, if someone asked me to write down my goals for 2026, I wouldn't be able to give more than vague ideas. And I'm okay with that. Funnily enough, I think this is actually part of the reason why I've been able to achieve certain things more easily than other people who had more concrete goals. For example, I got into medical school, finished medical school while starting a business, getting distinctions. My goal throughout most of those years was just to explore my interests. I came first in my full-time masters while I was running a business full-time. My goal for that was nothing more than just study really fast. I've traveled the world giving workshops to thousands of people on learning. My goal throughout that was just to be good at what I do. My goals are more like general directions. And in the goal setting space, you're not meant to do that. But I actually do this deliberately. Over the years, I have moved away from traditional goal setting because I found that it has held me back more than it has helped me. It was just a source of unnecessary extra work and extra thinking and pressure and stress and frustration and setting the goal didn't actually help me to achieve them anyway. And I've seen in fact the same issue appearing hundreds of times in the students and the professionals that I work with. So in this video I want to share some of the observations that I've made around the issues with how we are normally taught to set goals and what I find to be a much better alternative that also actually helps you to achieve your goals more safely in the first place. The first place I want to start with is really unpacking what I have noticed has been an issue with traditional goal setting. The concept is sort of you are kind of here in a point in time and you figure out where you want to be right inside this box like this becomes the goal and you're meant to make this goal uh you know a lot of people use the word smart goals right specific measurable achievable realistic and time bound or timely and the idea is that instead of having a goal that's like I want to be successful you know we we give ourselves a more specific more measurable goal that might be like I want to get this particular job within the next, you know, 6 months or something like that and then we can create this path, this plan that helps us achieve this goal. And while I do think that there is benefit in creating smart goals that are specific, I also think that there are some issues with just approaching goal setting in this way. And one of those issues is that I feel that a traditional method of goal setting tends to be very insight limited. You never know what you don't know. I was a doctor. I entered into medical school. Those of you that are familiar with my story know that I was really motivated to enter into medical school like really motivated like obsessively. And then when I entered into medical school, I got through it. I became a doctor. Eventually I ended up quitting. A big part of that was because at the time when I was 16 years old saying, "Hey, I want to become a doctor. " I didn't really know what that meant. I didn't know what the career meant. I didn't really know what the training involved. I didn't know what the daily work actually would feel like. Part of that is because I probably didn't do enough research. But a bigger part of that is that there are just some things that are just too difficult for you to know. The ability for you to set a goal that is actually meaningful for yourself depends on your level of insight into that goal. If my perception of what being a doctor is based on just watching TV and what you know random people are telling me, that's not likely to be accurate. And it wasn't accurate. And so in a way even though I achieved the goal that's not really the reason why I set the goal in the first place because the ultimate reason that we are setting this goal is not so that we can achieve the goal. It is what this goal means to us. It is the therefore if I achieve this goal then I will be able to feel a certain way. We set goals so that we can feel fulfilled or we can feel you know satisfied or happy or whatever the emotion is that we're expecting to feel after this goal. If someone said to me, if you become a doctor, you're going to hate every single day of your life, which is an exaggeration, but if someone said that, I would if I believed them, I probably wouldn't set that goal because, you know, why? It doesn't make sense. And so, there's this assumption that is usually not very explicit about what we

think this goal is actually going to achieve for us. And what I've observed in working with so many people is that sometimes a goal that we're setting is a placeholder for that feeling we want to achieve. And a lot of the time we're getting lazy with the evaluating whether that goal is actually going to achieve that feeling or not. It's really difficult and challenging emotionally to accept that maybe the goal that you're really motivated to achieve is not going to make you feel the way that you think you're going to feel. That's destabilizing. It creates a lot of uncertainty in our life. It's much easier to just assume that that's not going to be the case. And just say, I'm sure it will be fine. I just need to focus on this goal. It's an easier way to live until you, you know, achieve it and then you feel miserable. And so the traditional advice that I used to give around this was, hey, well, you know, you set this goal, but do as much research as you can. You know, like really try to develop as much insight if your goal and the meaningfulness of that goal to you in your life and basically the chance that achieving this goal is actually going to lead to the ultimate real thing, the true goal that you actually want. If that is going to be limited by your insight, then you owe it to yourself to do as much research as you can. Learn about the career, learn about the decision, learn about the consequences. Get to a point where this goal is a safe, good decision. I still think that is good advice. You should do a reasonable amount of due diligence and research into your goals and c is that going to achieve my true goal. But the other issue is if I think about putting myself back when I was 16 years old and researching more about the job, I wasn't even in a position to know whether that would be fulfilling or not because I didn't know enough about myself. So the issue here is that our insight limitation is not limited just towards the decision or the career or the consequences of the goal. It's also about insight to do with ourselves. From the age of 16 to however old I was when I graduated, like in my early 20s, I learned a lot about myself, my personality, my values, my preferences, the types of things that I found fulfillment in, the types of problems and challenges I enjoyed and found fulfillment in solving. These insights into myself were things that I didn't have access to when I was 16. And so, even if I knew exactly what it meant every single day to be a doctor, I don't think I would have understood what that means for me. And so when people ask me, hey Justin, why did you leave medicine? The answer I give now is just that I think there are some things about a decision and about ourselves that we just don't know until we've experienced certain things. Time has passed. And I think that's a statement that most reasonable people would agree with. The danger here is that when we believe a little bit too much or subscribe onto traditional goal setting and we say, "Hey, this year is going to be the year that things are really changing because when I achieve these goals, it's going to lead to X, Y, and Z. " When we believe that and we don't leave ourselves open to the fact that, hey, we could just be totally wrong due to our limited insight, this creates an outcome blindness. And I see this all the time, especially when I work with younger students going through school and university. There's so much fixation on achieving a goal. You've set the goal. You've said, "Hey, if I achieve this goal, life's going to be good. " So now we feel good about having that goal. And that goal gets locked in and it gets reinforced. We don't want to challenge that goal. And so we drive ourselves fixing towards this goal with such tunnel vision that it actually blinds us to evaluating the processes that we're using that would lead to us achieving the goal in the first place. So as a learning coach where I see that all the time is when people have a certain goal about an exam result or passing a certain paper. And so they're so fixated every single day on just passing that paper. And they're so worried about not achieving this goal, they're not actually taking a step back to examine their learning skills because even though it's so logical that to do well with learning and achieve a learning goal, you need to have a good learning process and method and strategy, just the time it takes to step away and to look at that becomes hard to commit to. I don't want to re-examine my methods because that's going to take time and that time could be used in studying. I don't want to examine the way that I'm learning and my processes because that means I have to open myself up to the possibility that what I'm doing right now is wrong. And the emotional burden of examining whether what we are doing right now is correct and aligned has so much baggage attached to it that in my practice as a coach this is one of the biggest barriers to people actually achieving their goal. In psychology this is related to something called process neglect or means neglect where people are not evaluating whether the process they're using actually helps them achieve a goal. And in this

example, the goal itself is actually a coping mechanism because examining the process can actually feel uncomfortable. They're using the comfort and security of having a goal as a method of avoidance. I'll see someone who really wants to enter into a certain university with a certain degree and then sometimes they feel anxious about it. Sometimes they feel afraid that they're not going to achieve it. And then how do they compensate? They print out a poster of the goal. They stick it to the wall. They set it as their phone lock screen. They reinforce the fact that this goal exists and they use that motivation to snuff out that feeling of uncertainty when actually should be channeled towards evaluating their current processes to see if it is a good strategy. In my experience, this is a common reason why people that have repeatedly failed achieving certain goals are not likely to then succeed because the reason they have repeatedly and consistently failed is that they have neglected the process that they're using. When you use the same bad process more times, you just get more of the same bad result. And so for me, I feel that is a real danger in buying in too much to go setting as a paradigm. And so this is where there's this alternative school of thought which says that if this true outcome that we're trying to reach, like this is the true goal that we're trying to get to. If we're saying that setting a goal is not the thing that safely allows us to reach this, then perhaps we shouldn't be trying to achieve this by setting goals. Perhaps we should try to reach this is by creating value alignment. So we're saying in order for me to feel this way, it's less important what goals I achieve and it's more important how I live my life following and abiding by a set of values. And then naturally the goals I create reflect those values. And so overall I feel that this is a much better philosophy. A goal for 2026 could just be figure out my values, identify my values, and try to live my life more in alignment with those values. But I also found that approach had its own set of limitations. To achieve value alignment, there's two things that we need. The first thing is to understand what our values actually are. And if we don't know what our values are, we have to understand how we can figure it out. The idea is that we need to do some soularching, some introspection, some reflection to figure out what our values are and identify our values and we should know what our values are like the four or five biggest values for us in our life and then once we have those things everything else falls in alignment. This becomes our north star. However, this goes against the research on values and human psychology, especially around constructivist and humanistic psychology. Because what this research tells us is that our values are not static. They're not something to be discovered. They are not something that kind of exists there as a buried hidden gem that if we do enough soul searching, meditate on enough mountain tops, suddenly now we know what our values are. Our values are something that is actually dynamic. They're actively constructed. As we navigate our way through the world, having certain experiences, making certain decisions, thinking about ourselves as a certain type of person, we gain data. We gain data on what it feels like to make those decisions, to live like that person, what it feels like to achieve certain goals. We learn about ourselves and what we truly value or don't value. And it's that process that creates those values. The discovery of values is a very active process. And once you have discovered a set of values that are meaningful for you, those values can also change. They don't change as quickly as your favorite ice cream flavor might change, but they do change and they evolve. And as we mature through life, those values also mature and evolve. And this becomes really challenging because this process of discovering what your values are, put that in air quotes, this takes time. And remember, it's constantly changing. So in practical reality, the most common situations I see from people trying to create value alignment, there's three different situations. Situation number one is someone has a really clear understanding about what their values are and they're able to create this value alignment. This is extremely rare and I see this with people who have been pursuing this value alignment for decades and it's not something that they had in their 20s and their 30s and their 40s. It's something that they were figuring out throughout all of that time and then they're getting to a point where they feel they have greater clarity. The other two much more common situations I see is someone who

thinks they have a clear understanding, but it's it's not true. They're just taking values that they think are right. They're taking values that their colleagues or their parents or society has said these should be your values and they're not really challenging it. And so what inevitably happens is that as they go through life trying to live in alignment with these borrowed values, they feel dissonance. They feel misalignment. They're not getting that fulfillment and this feeling this goal that they were trying to reach here. They're not able to achieve it because they're not in real alignment with themselves because they didn't do enough of their introspection. They didn't challenge it enough. And for those that do a lot of critical introspection and they are really good critical thinkers, the most common thing that I see there is they just get paralysis. paralysis by analysis. What are my values? Are these really my values? How do I know that's really my value? What experience do I need to confirm or deny that this is my value? And if I don't know what my values are right now, how do I create alignment? What am I meant to do every day that I'm living, every week that I'm making decisions? How do I create alignment and know that I'm heading towards the north star, where I want to get to if I don't actually know what my values are in the first place? This is my other alternative and the alternative to traditional goal setting, the alternative to creating value alignment. This is a way that I try to operate. I've been operating like this for maybe the last 11 or so years. For me personally, it's allowed me to create a lot more fulfillment. I feel much more confident in my ability to achieve this ultimate end outcome. I can have very loose goals. I can have only a vague idea about what my values are and it feels good. It feels aligned. It feels right and it feels fulfilling. And this approach is what I call intention alignment. But before I go into that, I want to ask of you one thing. If you feel that this insight, this framework is helpful for you and you feel like this is actually making a meaningful positive difference to your life, then I would ask just share the video. The only difference between me shouting into the wind versus actually making a positive impact in people's lives is whether you share it or not. So, I'm going to explain what intention alignment is now. And if you feel that it is useful, please pay it forward. So, what is intention alignment? How do you do this? Why is it better? There's this term that was given by this philosopher called Friedrich Neer. It's called the will to power. This is not going to become like a philosophy video, but I do want to explain this a little bit. It makes a lot easier to understand. NE basically said that people make decisions, live a certain way, not because they're driven by survival. You know, some people will deliberately give their life for something that they feel is a greater cause or to protect their child or something like that. It's not just for pleasure or joy. It's not just to escape pain. Um he said that it's to achieve a will to power. And the way that he defined this is that he said the will to power is when someone is able to live the life they want to live being the person they want to be. For me, this resonates a lot. All the goals and the ambitions and the ideas and the things that I want to do. It's just what the version of me right now feels best represents the life I would like to live and the person that be. The reason I like this is because when we break this down into the life we want to live and the person we want to be, it means that this stuff can change. Like It doesn't matter if the idea of the life we want to live changes. It doesn't matter if the type of person we want to be changes. What matters is that we are constantly striving to stay true to the life we want to live and the person that we want to be. What matters is that we try to create alignment here. If our goal changes and we think that that's meaningful for us, then we owe it to ourselves to create that new alignment. I'll always remember when I used to do these seminars helping people enter into medical school and I'd ask a group of 200 people, put your hand up if you want to become a doctor. And of course, you know, this is a seminar about entering to medical school. Everyone in the room puts their hand up and I say, "Keep your hand up. If you have wanted to be a doctor for years and years, this is something that you've wanted since you were 6 years old. " And 90% of the room, their hand stays up. And for me, that situation is a bit of a red flag for me because there are a lot of things that I thought were a good idea when I was 6 years old. I don't really hold on to most of those opinions anymore. But when it comes to something like what you want to be when you grow up, the goal that you have, the type of life that you want to live, once you create a goal for yourself, that outcome fixation is very strong. It's a tough thing to give up that certainty that you've created for yourself and open yourself back up to the uncertainty

of not knowing what you want. And it's so strong that people will actively hold on to a goal that they know is no longer serving them. that is not achieving that ultimate goal for them because that uncertainty is so scary. They became a doctor, an engineer, started a business, they did the thing, they achieved the goal that they thought was going to be their key to a happy life and they're not feeling that way. They're not feeling fulfilled. They do feel a sense of misalignment. They feel like they want to change, but to open themselves back up to that uncertainty of, well, what do I do next? That becomes a cage for them. And that goal that was meant to be the solution has now become the problem. And so what I'm saying here with the idea of intention alignment is that we shift our win criteria. We say that we don't want to live a life unintentionally. We say that that's the worst case scenario where we intended to be a certain person but then we ended up being this person. We intended to live a life like this and feel a certain way but then we ended up living this life. the primary target becomes I have a concept of the person that I want to be based on what I understand right now and that could change and that's okay and I have a concept of what I want to do the things I want to achieve the goals and that could change but that becomes my intention and I want to create as much alignment with that intention as possible so that when I look back on my life I can say I lived the life the way that I intended it to for me at least having that perspective and that becoming my gold standard regardless of how I'm changing or how my goal is changing. That has been a source of deep and resilient fulfillment and it's a type of fulfillment that I never experienced when I was using just traditional goal setting or trying to achieve value alignment. And the best part is that I'm getting closer value alignment. I'm learning about my values and I'm creating more alignment there and I'm achieving all the goals. The only difference is that I'm protecting myself against that outcome blindness and that tunnel vision and I'm embracing the fact that I'm insight limited that these things could change and I owe it to myself to change if I think that's right for me. But the best part about living through intention alignment that I found is that the very process of trying to create intention alignment is fulfilling. The very process you've already achieved the outcome just by trying to create alignment between the person and the life you want to live and the actions and the decisions you make every single day. Just by trying to do that, it already feels like you won. The life we end up living as we try to seek alignment is aligned by default. We're not judging ourselves anymore so harshly. We're not saying we're walking through this maze and this labyrinth and there's this right path that we need to take to achieve our goal and only then if we take the right path will we achieve our goal and everything else is a failure. It's a better reflection of what life really is which is like driving through a desert. There is no path that you can go anywhere and you can pick any path that you want and when you look behind you will leave a trail and others might look at that trail and think that was a path and try to copy you. But the only thing we judge ourselves on is whether we are living in the way that we intended or not. Let's wrap that up. Let's make this a bit more practical so that at the end of this video you can actually do something with this new insight. So you hopefully at this point you're kind of understanding that intention alignment seems to be this thing that might be worth exploring. How do you practically apply this? It's very easy. We can borrow from a framework uh called Coob's experiential learning cycle and it basically gives you four different steps to do and you just repeat these four steps pretty much every single day like repeating you just go through this cycle and that cycle becomes your life. So Cob's experiential learning cycle it's really simple. We start with a hypothesis or an experiment. In this case, our experiment becomes living like the person we think we want to live or and be like uh and do doing the things that we think we want to do. So, at this point, we're asking ourselves the question, what do you want to do? What kind of life live? What kind of person do you want to be? And the beauty of this is that you can just start with having absolutely no idea. You can just take a guess. The way the cycle works is that it's self-correcting. So you can be completely absolutely wrong at the beginning and it just absolutely it has no impact to the long-term success. So you just have a hypothesis. I feel like maybe I want to do this type of thing. live a certain kind of life. Maybe I want to be like a certain type of person. And you don't

even have to think about it very deeply. And then all you do is you just live life with that in mind. This becomes the experience that you have. So use a macro level example to make this easier to understand. The example I use is me going through and becoming a doctor. So the life that I wanted to live that's what I thought I wanted was to be a doctor. So I wanted to live a certain life where I was working in a hospital uh working with high functioning team uh solving certain types of problems engaging in that kind of environment thinking about certain types of things. This is the sort of vision of the life that I wanted to live and the person that I wanted to be was someone that was really good at that. A good problem solver uh a good member of a team highly functioning myself very efficient. I lived that I did that and then I had the experience. What the experience does is it gives us real world data at this point here. This is just our thinking. thought. We we don't know if this is true or not. And so the experience when we try to live in alignment with that, that tells us what it's really like. And so after we have the experience, we reflect on it. So that's the next step which is reflection. After you have the experience, you just ask yourself, how was that? You ask yourself, how did it feel? You can think about how am I reacting to this or how are other people reacting to me? Sometimes that gives us a unique type of reflection. Are there any other thoughts or observations that you have made based on having had this realworld experience? So for me, I realized a lot of things. I realized that the life I thought being a doctor meant was not what I thought it was going to be. But then I also learned a few more things. I realized that actually I'm someone that really values having a certain level of freedom and autonomy and making a positive impact is really important to me. And I felt working as a doctor, I was really restricted in the impact that I could make because the health system is a mess and really difficult to change. And that lack of empowerment to create impact or something that really bothered me. I didn't realize at the time back when I was just in the this experiment stage, I didn't realize that the life I needed to live is the one where I would be able to have that kind of impact and where I would have that level of autonomy and that level of freedom. And it's only through going through that experience and then reflecting on it was I able to learn this about myself. And this process of after reflecting on it and then learning more about yourself and seeing what that means. We call this abstraction. And this is that final step which is that after we have done the reflection, we ask ourselves okay so what we want to generalize our findings. It's not just that we had an experience of working in the hospital and someone said this thing and you felt a certain way. That's just the event. Generalize that. What does that tell you about yourself, your preferences, your habits, your behaviors? When we have enough of these experiences and we reflect on them enough, we start seeing trends and patterns. Yes. One event that happened when I was working as a doctor is that my leave for an entire year got declined like 40 times. That's just one event. What did it teach me about myself? It taught me that having a certain level of autonomy and freedom is important. I want to be able to control my time and that really bothers me when I can't. The abstraction is saying yes, this is what happened in this current certain experience. But what is the wider implication? What does that mean outside of that singular experience? And when we do the abstraction, it tells us more about ourselves, the person we want to be. It tells us more about the life that we want to live. And then that naturally feeds into the next hypothesis or experiment. So now we update our concept of the life we want to live and the person that we want to be. And then we have a new round of experiences which again gives us more of that real world data and feedback. And so this is it. There's no end point. Engaging in the process is the end point. And it doesn't have to be measured across years. It could be across a single day. You could want to be a certain type of person that interacts and communicates with someone in a certain way. So the next day you have a certain type of conversation and you try to be a certain type of person in that conversation. You see how that makes you feel. There might be a particular challenge coming up. You may want to be a certain type of person when you face that challenge. There might be a certain decision that you're coming up to that represents something like a job change or a new responsibility at work or or the opportunity to learn something new. And so you can look at those decisions through the filter of okay well what type of life do I want to live? What do these decisions mean in terms of the life that I would live? What does it mean in terms of the person that I want to be? And then you make those decisions. You have that experience and then you reflect on it and that becomes a learning opportunity. And the most important thing is that we recognize the end goal is not out there and fixed and the true goal that we want to achieve is

just this feeling of fulfillment and living the way that we want to live. And purely by engaging in this process and trying to create that intention alignment, we are already winning. And again, as a reminder, this doesn't mean you're not going to achieve your goals. This means that you're more likely to achieve your goals. Because when you think about the person you need to be, you start thinking about the skills and the attributes and the competencies and the processes that you need to engage in, you upskill yourself. You become a better version of yourself. There's no possible way that the version of me when I was 17, 18 year olds trying to enter into medical school would have been able to work double full-time hours doing a full-time masters coming first and getting published if I hadn't grown. If my skills and attributes and competencies had not expanded during those years and it's not that 15 years earlier I thought hey I want to one day be able to do this and so I just started this enormously long journey of developing those skills. I just developed the skills and the attributes that I thought I needed and wanted to be a certain type of person and becoming that person opened up opportunities for me and allowed me to achieve certain goals. So that is intention alignment and what I think is the real way to actually achieve the goals that matter to you. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone that you think will also find it helpful. Let me know in the comments as well. If one of the things that you want to improve and work on is learning to learn, then I would also recommend that you check out this video here where I break down that skill to make it a bit easier for you. But otherwise, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.