Between 2013 and 2016, I had a habit. At the beginning of every year, usually before my birthday, I would take a week or two to slow down, reflect, and then write a long list of goals. It felt reassuring, as if naming things was already a form of control.
It took me time to understand that several things were deeply wrong with that approach.
The first challenge was overwhelmingness. There were simply too many goals competing at the same time for my attention, energy, and sense of meaning. I eventually realised that choosing and selecting, in such conditions, has little to do with ambition. It is an act of survival. Still, I tried to address the problem in the most rational way I knew: by prioritising. I organised my goals into tiers, carefully dividing tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. By the way, we are speaking about three full pages, Times New Roman, size 12). On paper, the system worked. I usually completed most of the first tier, about half of the second, and only a few items from the third.
That said, it was never one hundred percent. And that matters more than we like to admit. Completion gives dopamine and creates momentum. Incompletion generates friction and quiet frustration. In the short term, doing twenty out of twenty-five goals feels great. In the long run, three out of three, then ten out of ten, then twenty out of twenty, builds far more energy.
Going back to those files from 2013 to 2016, there was one line in the third tier that stood out. “Publish one hundred blog posts.” No deadline. No plan. Just a number. And here we are with the second mistake. You need to be specific if you want to reach something. There’s nothing worse than a marathon without a defined track.
For the sake of clarity, at that time I was running two different blogs (you can find them here and here). I eventually stepped away from both: they required significant effort, but delivered limited impact. Looking back, it was a necessary pause.
And that revealed the third problem I have with goals, which is different than the one you would imagine reading this sentence. Letting them go, especially when the scenario changes (or you change as persona) is incredibly hard for me.
So, for more than ten years, that number followed me. Not as a deadline, not as pressure, but as a low, persistent background noise.
Maybe my unconscious understood something before I did. Maybe it knew that I would eventually reach that number. And maybe the same is still true for the goals I have not reached yet, the ones that never disappeared and keep hovering in the background, half abandoned and half alive.
What I know now is that my life works in cycles. It feels good when I set a goal, because direction calms anxiety. It feels good when I reach it, because closure brings relief. But my life often feels poorest in the middle, when goals stop being guides and slowly turn into measures of worth.
And now, here we are. One hundred posts. I finally reached that original 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 third tier goal. The blog is not the one I imagined in my old Word files. The voice is different. I am different. But the number is there, checked off at last. Quietly reached, without celebration and without regret.
Considering this is my post number one hundred, I could easily turn it into a lesson, a summary, a clean list of insights. But that would feel dishonest. Some things only make sense after you let them rest.
So I will leave the lessons for later. For post number one hundred and one.
