Don’t Set Another Goal Until You Know What You Don’t Want

What if the reason you struggle to set goals is not because you are lazy, unmotivated, or unclear about everything?

What if you are asking the wrong question first?

In this episode of the Driven 2 Thrive Broadcast, Brent Dowlen explores the power of anti-goals: starting with what you do not want so you can begin finding clarity about what you do want. For men carrying careers, marriage, kids, bills, responsibilities, and the quiet pressure of trying to keep life moving, traditional goal-setting can feel too big, too vague, or too disconnected from real life.

This episode reframes clarity as something that can begin through elimination. You may not know exactly what you want your future to look like, but you probably know what you do not want your marriage, health, work, fatherhood, or character to become.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

How anti-goals help create clarity when traditional goal-setting feels overwhelming.

Why not knowing what you want does not mean you have no direction.

How to identify the unwanted life your current patterns may already be building.

Why some things you want to escape are still giving you something valuable.

How to turn an anti-goal into one practical decision this week.

Big Takeaways

A goal tells you what you are trying to build. An anti-goal helps you stop accidentally rebuilding the life you already know you do not want.

Clarity does not always arrive as a vision. Sometimes it arrives as a boundary.

A life you never chose can still become the life you built.

You do not need enough clarity to plan the next ten years. You need enough clarity to stop repeating one decision that keeps taking you somewhere you do not want to go.

Why You Should Listen

If you have built the career, marriage, family, home, and responsibilities but still feel like something is off, this episode will give you a practical way to begin moving again without needing a perfect ten-year plan.

This is not about blowing up your life. It is about seeing your direction clearly enough to make one better decision.

Transcript

Don’t Set Another Goal Until You Know What You Don’t Want

[00:00:00] If I were to ask you what you want for dinner, you might have an answer. You might not, but you might have an answer. In fact, depending on how long you've been married, if you're married, there's a pretty good chance you and your wife could spend more time deciding where to go for dinner than actually spend eating dinner together.

Let's, let's just face it, if you're married, you've been there. If I asked you what you'd like to do this weekend, you might know. More likely, you'd start giving me a list of all the things you need to get done this weekend. The yard needs mowed. There's something in the garage that you've been meaning to fix.

One of the kids has something going on. Maybe your wife has something she wants you to get done. We all have the honey-do list. You have one of those projects you've been putting off for three weekends now, and maybe if everything goes well, you'll get a couple hours where nobody needs anything from you, and you can work on that But if I asked you what you want out of life, there's a pretty good chance the answer gets [00:01:00] even less, less specific.

I wanna be successful. I wanna be financially secure. I want my family to be happy. I want to retire someday. Does that sound familiar? I'm, I'm familiar with that one. Maybe you'd go with, "I wanna be rich," because that seems like it would solve a fair number of problems, and you're not wrong about that either.

You, me, and a whole lot of other guys have some version of these same responses to these same questions, and it's just a common thing. We don't always know what we want. Sometimes, if we're being fair about it, we don't actually care enough about the question in that moment to come up with a question because it's really just not even on our radar, right?

We're busy trying to make life work. We don't have a lot of time for existential questions when we're already running at redline. Most guys I know aren't sitting around wondering [00:02:00] what their dream life is gonna look like. They're trying to make a living without working themselves to death, provide a good life for the people they love, spend some actual time with those same people, maybe keep the house from falling apart if you live in an older house like I do.

Or maybe just get enough sleep where they don't feel like they got hit by a truck every single morning. We've all played that game. We all know thinking about the future is probably something we should do. It's important. We should probably plan ahead, and we know we should set goals, and God knows I've talked about them here on this show many times.

But seriously, you got work, bills to pay, your family, kids in school, school sports, extended commitments, more bills to pay. Yeah, I know I said that, but it seems like bills just keep showing up no matter what, right? A house that needs some work, a yard to mow, community commitments. Maybe you're coaching your kid's sport team or serving in church.

Somewhere along the way, you might even get to see your wife for five minutes [00:03:00] before you both fall down, go to sleep, and do it all again tomorrow So when someone comes along and says, "You need to sit down and create a detailed vision of the next 10 years of your life," I understand why a lot of guys don't do it, and I've probably been guilty of doing that to you guys too, so I apologize for that.

It's not necessarily because you don't care about your future. I know it's not because I don't care about my future. It's not necessarily because you're being lazy or anybody else is. Sometimes the question is just too damn big. What do you want your life to look like? Hmm. That's a huge question. I mean, really.

Where do you wanna live? What kind of work do you wanna do? How much money do you wanna make? What do you want your marriage to look like? What kind of relationship do you want your kids to have with you when they're adults? What kind of shape do you wanna be in? What do you want your days to look like?[00:04:00] 

And we act like we're just supposed to be able to sit down with a notebook and a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning and be like, "Yeah. We'll sort all that out, no problem Maybe we made setting goals harder and more time-consuming than it actually has to be though. A while back, I was listening to a business video from Cody Sanchez.

I love to listen to the Big Idea podcast. She got a great show, and she said something that caught my attention, not because it was a completely new idea to me. Actually, it caught my attention because thought... I thought, "Wait. Wait a minute. I do that. I do that. Maybe I'm doing something right." I've done some version of this for years.

I just never put a name to it. It's just part of my thought process. But what if instead of starting with everything you want, you started with what you don't want? Because we may struggle to tell somebody exactly what we want, [00:05:00] but most of us have a pretty strong opinions about the things we don't want.

Maybe you know... don't know exactly where you wanna eat, but I guarantee there are three places your wife can s- suggest, and you'll suddenly discover that you do have an opinion 'cause you don't want those things. Listen, I wanna try to make dinner tonight, so I'm just gonna pick something up. Any preference?

I don't care. I'm easy, honey. Oh, good. There's a new Greek place I wanna try. No, no, I don't wanna do that. You really wanna hang out with the Greeks? I mean, that Mediterranean work ethic has got the whole world economy in a tailspin. I just wanted a kebab. Where, uh... Where do you wanna go? I don't care. I'm easy.

Uh, then Chinese? Pass. We'll all be eating that food full time soon enough. You know where this is headed, Mom. Just say, "Texas barbecue." That sounds good. I'm not picky. I love that show, and that clip just hit me just right 'cause it's hilarious 'cause I've had that same argument so many times. You may not know exactly what you want your [00:06:00] career to look like five years from now, but you probably know there are parts of your current work you don't wanna spend another five years doing.

Maybe you have some beautiful detailed vision of your marriage 10 years from now. Probably not, but maybe. Sure, I'll give you that. But if you're like a lot of us, you probably don't. But you probably, while you don't have that great 10-year vision, you probably know you don't wanna wake up one day and realize you and your wife have become two people who manage a house or raise children together but don't actually know each other anymore.

I'm guessing you, you know that much. You don't want that. You may not know your perfect fitness goal. That's okay, but you probably have some ideas of what you don't want your health to keep you from being able to do. You see, we don't always wanna think about these things, but we sure do have opinions [00:07:00] about them when we're confronted with them And that's where this idea gets interesting.

Let me share this clip with you that, from Cody Sanchez's podcast, All Rights Are Hers, but I, I wanted you to hear her say it, and we'll jump from there. Anti-goals before goals. So most goal-setting advice tells you to get clear on what you want, but Charlie Munger thought that was the wrong place to start, and I think he was right.

Every time I'm setting financial targets for something, whether this is my year, a new business, a new investment, I write the anti-goals first before s- putting a single goal on the page. Now, when I heard that, what struck me was how often we confuse uncertainty with having no information. We say, "I don't know what I want," and then we treat that like our mind is completely just blank.

But it's not. Like, there's absolutely nothing to work with there until we suddenly discover our purpose, build the perfect vision board, and have some life-changing moment of clarity. [00:08:00] But that's not usually true. You may not know what kind of work you want to do 10 years from now. That's honest. I'm not sure I know what kind of work I want to do 10 years from now.

But you know you don't want to spend those 10 years missing dinner with your family five nights a week. Or maybe you know exactly what a great shape looks like, but you know, you don't know what that looks like in your 40s because your body has started sending you strongly worded letters about some of the decisions you made in your 20s, 'cause I know all about that.

And so you don't know what that perfect shape looks like now with these repercussions from earlier decisions. But one thing you do know is you wanna be able to get on the floor and play with your kids and not be winded doing so. You may not be able to describe the perfect marriage, but you know you [00:09:00] don't want to become polite roommates who share a mortgage.

You may not know exactly what your purpose is or what the next chapter of your life is supposed to look like, but you may know with absolute certainty that you don't want to spend another decade building a life that looks successful from the outside while feeling increasingly disconnected on the inside.

And that matters, because not knowing exactly where you wanna go does not mean you don't have information about direction. It just means you may not have a destination yet. You're starting with a compass. That's the mistake a lot of people think... make right there, is they think they're starting without a compass, but you're not.

And this is not reverse engineering a goal. I wanna be clear about that, because they're two different things. Reverse engineering says, "I know where I wanna go. Now, what steps would get me there?" This is something very different. This says, "I may not know exactly where I [00:10:00] wanna go yet, but I know there's some places I don't wanna end up."

This is not a complete life plan, and it's not supposed to be. But if you know there's a road you don't wanna travel, you've already eliminated one direction, and sometimes that's enough to start building some clarity to make those next decisions. And that's what we're gonna work on today. We're gonna look at how you can use what you already know about the life you don't want to be in creating something of a clarity about the life you might want.

You don't need to have the next 10 years figured out by the end of this episode. You just need a better place to start, 'cause that's where a lot of us get hung up, is just the starting point. And I realize there's a little irony in telling a guy who is already exhausted and running a red line that he needs to spend more time thinking about his future But sometimes before you make another major decision or try to map out the rest of your life, you need [00:11:00] rest and recover to actually think clearly in the first place, which gives me the perfect place to check in with our sponsors who make this show possible.

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You can go to MyPillow.com and use code THRIVE for up to 80% off your order with free shipping over $75 for our listeners. And as always, thank you for supporting the sponsors who support this show and keep us on the air. Now back to the episode. The Driven to Thrive broadcast, purpose, growth, and lasting impact for men.

Helping men go from living to thriving, purpose-filled, intentional lives. Welcome to the Driven to Thrive broadcast where men learn to lead themselves, their families, and their world with purpose, growth, and lasting impact. I'm your host, Brent Dowlen. Let's get right back into it. So before the break, I said something I wanna come back to because it really is the foundation of everything [00:13:00] else we're gonna talk about today.

You may not know exactly where you want to go, but you're not starting without a compass. Now, I wanna make sure we don't turn this into something it's not. This isn't about becoming a negative person who walks around defining his entire life by everything he hates. That would be stupid. I don't think building your whole future around what you're trying to escape is particularly healthy, and we'll come back to that later because anti-goals have a limitation.

They can help you get moving, but eventually you have to decide what you're actually moving towards This isn't reverse engineering a goal. If you already know exactly what you want, great. There's a lot of good ways to work backwards from a goal, figure out the steps, put them on the calendar, and start moving.

But that's not where a lot of people actually are. A lot of people are standing in the middle of their lives saying, "I know something needs to change. I just don't know what or where or what that really looks like." [00:14:00] And that's a very different problem, and I've been there. After my first business didn't end the way I wanted it to, and then my second business didn't end the way I wanted it to either, I didn't have this beautiful, crystal clear vision of what I was gonna build next.

There wasn't some moment where the clouds parted, and suddenly I knew exactly what the next 10 years of my life and business were supposed to look like. I, I didn't. What I did know was that I did not wanna go back to working a regular nine-to-five in the IT world. Now, to be fair, there were a lot of perfectly reasonable arguments for doing exactly that.

I had years of experience in IT. I knew the work. I was good at the work, and it's a world I understood, and there were a lot of security that comes with going back to something you already know well. And when businesses don't work out the way you hope, security starts sounding pretty attractive. I have a wife and kids.

I have bills to pay. I wasn't a 20-year-old couch surfing with nothing to [00:15:00] lose and calling it entrepreneurship. There are people connected to all the decisions I make, and even with that, I still knew I didn't wanna go back, but I had to work fast. I couldn't have told you exactly what the next business was gonna become.

I couldn't have drawn you a straight line from where I was standing to where I am now. And if you had asked me to write out a 10-year vision, I probably would have given you a lot of vague answers and hope you didn't ask too many follow-up questions because I didn't have any answers. But I knew one road I didn't wanna take.

That didn't give me the whole answer, but it eliminated answers. That mattered more than I understood at the time because sometimes clarity doesn't arrive as a vision. Sometimes it arrives as a boundary. It sounds like, "I don't know exactly what comes next, but I know I'm not going back to that," or, [00:16:00] "I don't know exactly what a great marriage looks like for us five years from now, but I know I don't wanna keep drifting further apart."

It can even look like, "I don't know what being in the best shape of my life means at 43, or in my case 46, but I know I'm not willing to keep losing physical capacity every year and pretending I'm gonna deal with it later." Or even, "I don't know what my purpose is yet, but I know the version of success is costing me more than I wanna keep paying right now."

That's all information. It may not feel as exciting as a vision, probably not. You can't always put it on a poster. I don't see some little cat motivational poster with a cat hanging on a limb with that as a, you know, byline. It probably won't make a good screensaver for your computer. But a boundary can create movement before a vision creates direction You're not [00:17:00] trying to plan your entire future from an anti-goal.

You're trying to stop giving every possibility an equal vote. That's all. We're, we're eliminating options, and that's why I think this becomes much more practical than just sitting down and making a list of things you don't like. Because most of the lives we don't want aren't created in a dramatic decision.

It's not like, bam, there it is, right? They're accumulated. A man usually doesn't wake up one morning and decide, you know what? I think I'd like to become completely disconnected from my wife over the next eight to 10 years. That would be ridiculous, and it happens a lot more quietly than that, right? If you've been married for any length of time, you probably know.

Work is busy, the kids need something, one of you is tired, the other one has something on their mind. You stop talking about anything that isn't logistics because there's always another [00:18:00] logistical problem that needs solving. Who's picking up the kids? What time is practice? Did we pay that bill? What are we doing this weekend?

What do you want for dinner? And there we are, right, right, right back to that dinner conversation again. Listen, I won't have time to make dinner tonight, so I'm just gonna pick something up. Any preference? I don't care. I'm easy, honey. Oh, good. There's a new Greek place I wanna try. No, no, I don't wanna do that.

And while that clip is funny, I promise that's the last time I'll throw it in. It's funny because it's familiar, but none of those conversations are bad. That's just part of building a life together. Marriage involves a surprising amount of calendar management. But five years later, you can look across the room and realize that somewhere between managing the house, raising kids, and trying to keep everything moving, you stop being curious about each other.

You didn't choose that life, but you helped build it. The same thing happens with your health. Very few men decided that they wanted to be less capable this year. Nobody circles a date on the calendar and is like, "Hey, [00:19:00] this year, I'd like my back to hurt more, my energy to drop, my testosterone to get lower, and I want tying my shoes to become a cardiovascular event."

Raise your hand. Did you do that? Anybody? I mean, you didn't, right? It happened one decision at a time. You're busy today, so you skip the workout. You're tired, so you eat whatever is easiest. You don't have an hour, so you do nothing for twenty minutes 'cause you can't take a full hour to exercise. And because the consequences don't show up immediately, that decision feels almost free, like you got away with it.

That's one of the strange things about being a human. We're very good at responding to what is happening right in front of us and not nearly as good about feeling the weight of something that may happen years from now, right? A donut in my hand now tastes a whole lot better than six-pack abs for four years from now or, you know, a year and a half from now.

Psychologists often talk about status [00:20:00] quo bias or, and temporal discounting. Status quo bias, status quo bias is our tendency to keep doing what we're already doing because familiar feels easier and safer than change. Even when we're not particularly happy with the results, we'll just keep doing it 'cause it's, it's normal.

Temporal discounting is the tendency to give more weight to what we might get right now, like I said, donut in hand, than to what it may cost us later. The couch is real right now. Heart disease, disease, that's, that's theoretical. Answering one more work email feels really useful right now. The distance growing in your marriage is kinda hard to marriage...

Or, sorry, kinda hard to measure Skipping the trip because you're not physically capable of doing it is years away. So we keep making those decisions that solve today while quietly creating tomorrow, [00:21:00] and none of this requires us to be bad men. That matters to me because I don't think shame is particularly useful here.

You can love your wife and still neglect your marriage. You can love your children and still become too busy to know them as well as you think you do. You can care about your health and still make decisions every single day that slowly take it away from you. Most of the time, there's no hypocrisy in that.

There's just this gap between what matters to us and what our repeated decisions are actually starting to produce and build in our lives. There's an old principle in scripture about sowing and reaping. Paul writes about it in Galatians, and we tend to hear that language and immediately think about punishment.

Do something bad, something bad happens to you. Got it. But the principle is much broader than that, and it's much more practical than that. When you repeatedly put it in the ground, it has a tendency to grow. A farmer doesn't plant one kind of seed every day for ten [00:22:00] years and act shocked when the field produces exactly what he planted.

That would be ludicrous. Life is a little harder to see because your harvest takes longer. The decision you make today may not cost you anything today. That's why it's so easy to repeat it tomorrow, and then again the day after that, and the day after that. And a life you never chose can still become the life you built.

That's where I think the first real use of anti-goals begins. Not with some massive vision exercise, not with trying to figure out exactly what you want every part of your life to look like. Start by naming what you don't want to accidentally build. Take your health, your relationships, your work and mission, and the kind of man you're becoming, then finish this sentence: I do not want For example, I don't want my wife and [00:23:00] me to become roommates.

I don't want my kids to remember me as the man who was always at work. I don't want to reach 50 and realize my health now determines what my family can and cannot do because I didn't take care of myself. I don't want to spend another 10 years resenting work I chose to keep doing. I don't want to become a man who's constantly angry, constantly tired, constantly distracted, or constantly somewhere else even when he's standing in the same room.

Look, don't make it pretty. Don't try and, you know, spoof it up. Nobody's grading this. You don't have to turn it into an affirmation or make it sound good enough to post online. This isn't some crazy mantra. Just be accurate. Then look at the list and ask yourself one more question. If nothing changed right now, which of these am I already moving towards?[00:24:00] 

That question may be a little uncomfortable, but discomfort is not the goal. The goal is trajectory. You're trying to see where your current patterns are taking you before you get there, because once you can see the unwanted destination, something else becomes visible: the price. You can make a list of 20 things you don't like about your life and still have no idea what you're doing Tuesday morning.

Complaining is actually very easy to do. Everybody does it, and most of us can generate a pretty impressive list if given enough coffee and a quiet room of things we're unhappy about. The anti-goal is not that. The anti-goal becomes useful when you can identify what the current direction is costing you, and more importantly, when you decide which cost you are no longer willing to keep paying.

Think about the difference between those two statements. I don't want a stressful job. [00:25:00] Okay, I understand the feeling, but that doesn't really tell us a whole lot. Most people don't want a stressful job. I've never met somebody who said, "You know what? I'm really looking forward to a job, long hours, poor communication, constant anxiety, and just enough compensation to keep me trapped there for the next 15 years."

That, that wasn't in your job search? No? It's not a career goal. But what if the statement becomes, "I'm no longer willing to regularly trade dinner with my family for a promotion I don't actually want"? Now we got something to work with. Maybe I don't wanna be held unhealthy. Again, I understand, but it's a little too vague to help you make a decision.

Instead, try something like this: I am not willing to let my lack of physical capacity determine what my family can and cannot do together. It's different, right? The anti-goal becomes useful when it stops being a [00:26:00] list of things you dislike and starts revealing the cost you're no longer willing to pay, because everything has cost.

I think we understand that intellectually. I don't think we always live like we understand it, but I think we understand it intellectually, right? The job costs something. The business costs something. Being married costs something. Raising children definitely costs something, and I don't just mean financially, although anybody who's bought groceries for teenagers recently knows that that's part of...

It's, it's getting pretty impressive, the financial side of that. Your health costs something. Your commitments cost something. Your goals cost something. Even doing nothing, like doom scrolling, costs something. There's no vision, version of your life where you get to avoid the bill entirely. The question is, what are you paying with and whether you still believe the trade is worthwhile.

Sometimes you're paying with money, sometimes you're paying with time, sometimes it's [00:27:00] health or attention. Sometimes you're paying with your relationship with your wife and children. Sometimes you're paying with sleep, peace of mind, integrity, or the freedom to make different choices later, right? There's a lot of things you pay with, and because those costs don't always show up on the bank statement, we can pretend they're not real for a very long time, even when they are.

This is one of the reasons I think Charlie Munger's use of inversion is so useful here. Munger was known for asking questions backwards. Instead of only asking, "How do I succeed?" He would ask some version of, "What would reliably..." Or sorry, "What would reliably create failure?" then he'd work on avoiding those things.

It's a simple idea, but it changes the way you look at the problem. If you ask, "How do I build the perfect marriage?" You may not have the answer 'cause that's a really big question. But if you ask, [00:28:00] "What would almost certainly destroy your marriage if you did it consistently for the next 10 years?" You could probably come up with a pretty detailed list Pretty quickly.

Like, I think most of us could ride that out pretty fast. I mean, right? Quick list. Stop talking, hide things, never spend time together. Treat every disagreement like a competition, let resentment sit there for years, put everything and everyone ahead of the relationship. You may not know everything required to build a great marriage, but you know enough to stop feeding some of the things that would absolutely destroy one.

That's inversion, and I wanna be careful here because I don't wanna turn Charlie Munger into the inventor of anti-goals. The idea of thinking backward and learning through elimination is much older than any one person. But he was really good at applying it and explaining the principle to people. The same basic principles show up in stoic philosophy.

Epictetus spent a great deal of time distinguishing between what is [00:29:00] within our control and what is not. For example, you cannot control whether your company lays people off next year. You can, however, control whether your entire financial life depends on every paycheck arriving exactly on your schedule.

You cannot control every change that happens to your body as you age. I'm learning this one personally. Your body has opinions. It sends feedback, and sometimes it's pretty loud. But you can control a lot of what you repeatedly ask your body to do. You cannot control every difficulty in your marriage. You can control whether your wife only gets whatever attention is left after everybody else has taken their share of your attention.

You cannot control whether every business idea works. I also have personal experience with that one. But you decide which risk you're willing to take and what you refuse to sacrifice to keep that business alive. That's where anti-goals need to come back to your choices. [00:30:00] Because, "I don't want my boss to be an idiot," may be completely understandable, but it's not particularly useful.

You do not control whether your boss is an idiot, and for the record, I've been the boss before, and sometimes the boss is absolutely an idiot. But what do you control? You control whether you stay. You control whether you begin building another option. You control whether you allow work frustration to come through that front door with you every night.

You control whether you spend the next three years complaining about the same situation without changing anything you actually have the ability to change. That doesn't mean it can change tomorrow. I need to keep saying that because I'm talking to men with real responsibilities. If you have a wife, children, mortgage, insurance, groceries, and people depending on your income, "Just quit," is not s- serious advice, it's not good advice, and it's not advice that anybody worth listening [00:31:00] to is gonna tell you Sometimes the responsible choice is staying somewhere you don't wanna be a while longer while you build the ability to leave.

Those are not the same thing. One's passive, the other has direction. You can stay in the same job for another year and be doing something completely different with your life if that year is being used intentionally to reduce debt, build savings, learn skills, test an idea, make connections, or create another option.

From the outside, almost nothing may have appeared to change, but you're no longer simply paying the cost. You are deciding how long you're willing to pay it and what you are buying with that time. That is a very different relationship with the situation. So take the list we just talked about, the things you do not wanna build, then finish another sentence: I am no longer willing to keep paying for this with [00:32:00] Fill in the blank.

My health, my marriage, my time with my children, my sleep, my integrity, my financial freedom, my ability to be present when I get home. Don't choose all of them. That's where we get ourselves into trouble. We identify 12 things that need to change, get excited, decide Monday morning we're gonna be the beginning of a brand-new version of us, then by Tuesday, we're exhausted and eating something over the sink.

That's how you fail at that. Choose one. Which cost bothers you the most? Once you figure out which of those costs bothers you the most, ask yourself, "What recurring decisions keep changing me, charging me that same price?" Maybe it's saying yes every time work asks us for more. Maybe it's staying up until midnight because those are the only quiet hours you feel belong to you, even though you're exhausted every morning.

Maybe it's filling every open space on the calendar because you [00:33:00] don't want to disappoint anybody. Maybe it's refusing to have a conversation with your wife because you know it's gonna be uncomfortable, and tonight never feels like the right time. Maybe it's spending money to relieve stress created by the fact that you're worried about money.

Yeah, that's a, that's a sick loop. Been there, done that. Humans are complicated. We are. But once you can see the re- recurring decision, the anti-goal starts becoming a filter. An anti-goal gets useful when it stops describing what you dislike and starts identifying what you're no longer willing to trade away.

And you would think that once a man sees that cost clearly, the decision will become obvious. Sometimes it does. A lot of times it doesn't because there's another side into this that we have to be willing to look at. A lot of things we say we do not want are still connected to things that we very much [00:34:00] want, right?

Yeah. Let's get complicated for a second. You may hate the exhausting job. You may also like the paycheck. You may hate the schedule, but you also need the health insurance. You may not wanna spend every evening on the couch staring at the screen. You may also be so mentally exhausted by the end of the day that the thought of doing anything else feels more like one person asking something, one more person asking someone to do something or trying to get something from you.

You may not like the distance that's grown in your marriage. You may also know that changing it means you have to become more available, too. This is where anti-goals have to become more than complaints. There's a difference between wanting relief and choosing a different direction. I think most of us had a mo- have had a moment where we've said we wanted something to change when what we really wanted was for the discomfort to stop[00:35:00] 

Those aren't the same thing You can want the stress of your job to disappear without wanting to give up the security of the job. You can wanna lose weight without wanting to change the way you eat. You can want a closer marriage without wanting to give up the habits that help you avoid difficult conversations.

You can want more time with your children without wanting to say no to opportunities g- and commitments that keep taking your time away from them. Again, it doesn't make you a hypocrite. It means the current situation is giving you something, just not everything. Psychologists sometimes describe this as an approach avoidance conflict.

The same thing that can attract you can repel you at the same time. You wanna leave the job because you're miserable. You want to stay because it's safe. Been on that one. You wanna start the business because you want freedom. You [00:36:00] avoid starting because failure could cost you money, confidence, and it's really hard.

You wanna have the conversation with your wife because you miss her. You avoid the conversation because you're afraid of what might come out once you both start talking. We like to imagine decisions as if there is one obviously good choice and one obviously bad choice, and the only reason we have not changed is because we lack discipline.

Real life is rarely that clean or simple. Most difficult decisions are difficult because both choices contain something we want and something we don't necessarily want. That's why you can sincerely want change and sincerely resist it all at the same time, and that's where I think the stoics were useful again.

They're not trying to build a life without difficulty. They understood that discomfort is part of being alive. Not necessarily the whole [00:37:00] Buddha approach of all life is suffering, but they understood that difficulty was just part of life. Dif- discomfort was part of life. It's just how things work. The question was not, how do I avoid everything difficult?

The question was closer to which d- difficulties are worth carrying, actually? Because your anti-goal can become another fantasy if you imagine the alternative has no cost. You don't want that nine-to-five job? Uh, okay, sure. Entrepreneurship has a bill, too. I can tell you that one from experience. You may trade the boss you don't like for clients.

You may trade the predictable paycheck for months where you're doing math at the kitchen table trying to decide which expense can wait and what's not getting paid this month. You may trade a work schedule somebody else controls for a business that can consume every hour that you are awake. There is no cost-free option.

The question is whether [00:38:00] w- you would rather pay the price of building something of your own than continuing to pay the price of building something for someone else. For me, after those businesses didn't end the way I wanted to, the answer was still yes. That did not make the next step obvious. It did not make it easy.

It told me which difficulty I was more willing to carry. And this is where I think you have to be really careful with your own anti-goals. If you write down, I don't want to stay in this job, make another list. What does this job still give me? Maybe it gives you predictable income, health insurance, a schedule your family understands, a sense of competence, an identity that you've carried for 15 years.

Men, tune into that one. A lot of us are really, that's how we define our identities by what we do. People you enjoy working with, a retirement plan, low risk, right? Write that down. Don't lie to yourself in either direction. You don't [00:39:00] create clarity by pretending your life that you dislike gives you nothing.

So then you have to ask much better questions. How do I protect the actual, what actually matters while reducing the part I no longer want? And that question may lead to quitting eventually. It may lead to changing companies. It may lead to different roles. It may lead to starting something on the side of a five hours a week.

It may lead to spending the next six months building the financial buffer you need before you make any move at all. And if you're married, some of these decisions need to include your wife, not because you need permission to have thoughts of your own, but because your decisions have consequences that reach beyond you.

Ownership means accepting that your freedom and your responsibilities have to live in the same house. That's what reasonable progress may look like, not blowing up your life on Monday because you listened to a podcast on Sunday, not walking into work tomorrow and dramatically telling everybody what [00:40:00] you really think.

Probably a bad idea. Please don't use me as an excuse for that kind of stupid. Reasonable progress may be admitting that you want something to change while also being honest about why you've not changed it yet. Clarity gets more useful when you stop pretending the life you dislike gives you nothing.

Because once you know what you do not want, what it's costing you, and what the current situation is still giving you, you can finally start making decisions with the whole picture in front of you. But even the le-- even that leaves us with a problem. If all you do is organize your life around what you're trying to escape, the old life still gets to make all of your decisions.

You could spend years running away from the job you hated, the marriage you watched fail, the financial structure, struggle that you grew up with, the healthcare that frightened you, the version of yourself that you don't actually ever wanna be again. That can give you a tremendous amount [00:41:00] of energy for a while.

But eventually, you have to answer a different question. If I'm no longer building that life, what becomes possible instead? That question is where anti-goals either become useful or they start to become another trap. Because I want to be clear about something. I really like this idea, and I've been using some version of it in my own life for years without having a name for it.

And I think it's incredibly useful for a man who feels stuck because he cannot answer the giant questions of what he wants his life to look like or bigger questions like, "Who do I want to be?" Or, "What my marriage is supposed to look like." But anti-goals have a shelf life. They're a starting point. They're not a permanent operating system.

If every decision you make is organized around avoiding the life you used to have, then that life you used to have is still controlling you, and you're just moving in the opposite direction. And sometimes that's necessary for a [00:42:00] while. If you've been unhealthy for years, there may be a season where your entire focus is, "I do not want to keep living like this."

If your marriage has been drifting, there may be a season where the thought that gets you moving is, "I do not want to lose this." It's vague, but it gets you moving. If you spent twenty years in work that has slowly hollowed you out, "I'm not spending the next twenty years doing this," may be exactly the clarity you need to begin.

There's nothing wrong with that. Pain can get your attention. Fear can get your attention. Regret will absolutely get your attention. The unwanted future, that can get your attention too. But attention and direction are not the same thing, and at some point, you have to look away from the thing you're trying to avoid long enough to see what you might actually want to build.

Otherwise, you can spend your whole life in reaction, which is never a healthy option. I've seen this happen with people who grew up without money. They [00:43:00] become very successful, they're determined never to be poor again, and that fear can make a man work incredibly hard. It can make him save, it can make him take risks, it can make him build.

It can make it almost impossible for him to ever feel like he has enough, which is dangerous. The original problem may be gone. The fear is still running the company. You see the same thing in families. The man says, "I'm never gonna be like my dad." Okay, there could be a lot of reasons, right? Maybe his father was absent, maybe he was angry, he was unrela- reliable.

Maybe he was physically there, but emotionally somewhere else, or maybe he was violent. That anti-goal may be incredibly important, but not being my dad is not a complete philosophy on fatherhood. At some point, you have to decide what kind of father you want to become. The same thing is true in marriage. I don't wanna get divoi- divorced can keep you from doing some [00:44:00] very destructive things.

That's useful. But staying married and building a good marriage are not exactly the same goal. You can avoid divorce for decades while also avoiding each other. Eventually, the question has to become more, "How do we keep this thing from falling apart?" to, "What do we want this relationship to become?" That's where anti-goals have to hand the baton on to, well, you know, actual goals They help clear the ground, but then you have to build.

There's a passage in Philippians where Paul talks about forgetting what is behind and reaching forward towards what's ahead. That can sound strange if you take it to mean the past doesn't matter, but obviously, the past matters. Paul's own story mattered, the things he had done mattered, the things he had accomplished mattered, the person he had been mattered, but he refused to let the past become the only reference point for the [00:45:00] future.

I think there's something useful there for us. You don't have to pretend the old life didn't happen. You don't have to pretend the business failure didn't hurt. You don't have to pretend that the years you lost don't bother you. You do not have to pretend you're not afraid of becoming the man you watched somebody else become.

Learn from it. Use it. Name what you do not want to repeat, but eventually, you have to turn around because what you're running from can give you direction for a while, but it cannot give you a destination forever. And this is where I think one simple question can begin moving the anti-goal towards something more constructive.

Take the thing you wrote down. For example, "I do not want my wife and me to become roommates." Then ask, "If that were no longer true, what would become possible?" Not what is the perfect marriage. That question may still feel too big, and it probably is, honestly. Just ask, what becomes possible? [00:46:00] Maybe you become friends again.

Maybe you laugh more. Maybe you actually look forward to time alone together instead of realizing you have no idea what to talk about when the kids aren't there. Maybe there's more trust or more affection. Maybe the two of you become better at facing difficult seasons because you feel like you're on the same side again.

Now we're beginning to see something. Take another one, for example. I do not want my health to determine what my family can and cannot do together. If that were no longer true, what would become possible? Maybe you can go hiking with your kids. Maybe you travel without worrying whether you can physically handle it.

Maybe you get back on the motorcycle and ride longer without everything hurting. Maybe you have more energy at the end of the workday instead of giving your family what's left. Maybe you become the grandfather who can still get down on the floor with your grandkids every day, and [00:47:00] more importantly, get back up without needing that assistance from the small construction crew That is where anti-goals start opening a door.

You don't have to force yourself to describe the perfect future. You're simply asking what becomes possible if the things you do not want is no longer controlling the shape of your life. And I think this is also where we have to be careful about who we look to for examples. We love dramatic reinvention stories.

YouTube's full of them. The athlete who comes back from the career-ending injury, the entrepreneur who loses everything and builds back, the person who walks away from one life and becomes somebody completely different Sure, these stories can be useful. They can also make normal change look unimpressive, therefore, we don't feel like we're doing anything.

Honestly, most of us are not gonna have a movie montage. There's no soundtrack. Nobody's [00:48:00] standing outside your house waiting to film the morning you finally get up and go for a walk that you've been telling yourself for months you're gonna do. A lot of becoming looks incredibly ordinary while it's happening.

It's two people sitting at the kitchen table after the kids go to bed and talking about something other than the calendar or the bills. It's going to bed thirty minutes earlier. It's turning down one commitment. It's saving money quietly for a year. It's applying for one different position. It's lifting three days a week and looking almost exactly the same in the mirror for longer than you would actually prefer.

It's doing something small enough that nobody else noticed it yet It doesn't mean it's not working. It means you're building. The anti-goal helped you clear the ground. The question what becomes possible helps you decide what might belong there instead. [00:49:00] Now, the final step is where it, it becomes something you use or just another interesting idea you heard on some podcast, and I don't ever wanna be your excuse of some random interesting idea you heard on a podcast but you never actually use.

So let's look at where we are. So far, we've done a fair amount of thinking. We started with a life you do not want to accidentally build. We looked at what direction is... that direction has been costing you, and we're honest about what the current situation is still giving you, because change gets a lot harder when we lie to ourselves about the trade-offs.

And then we ask what might become possible if you stop building the thing you don't want. That's enough thinking for one day. At some point, clarity has to change a decision. Otherwise, it's just a very sophisticated form of procrastination, and I'm capable of that. In fact, I know a lot of people who [00:50:00] think themselves into nothingness.

I can think about something. I can research it. I can make a plan. I can improve the plan, reorganize the plan, and find a better app for managing the plan And my dopamine receptors don't know that I actually still have not done a damn thing. Somewhere along the way, I can spend so much time preparing to do the thing that I have successfully avoided doing, that my brain is going, "Yay, you did something."

And I don't think I'm alone in that. So this is where I wanna bring the whole idea down to one decision. You need enough clarity to stop repeating one decision that keeps taking you somewhere you do not want to go. That is the value of the anti-goal that we're talking about in this whole conversation.

It gives you something concrete enough to interrupt. Let's go back to the marriage example. Your anti-goal is, I do not want my wife and [00:51:00] me to become roommates. Cool. What reoccurring moment in your actual life is helping create that? Maybe every night after the kids are settled, both of you sit down and disappear into your phones.

I'm not saying phones are destroying your marriage, although I, I definitely lean that way. I'm not interested in blaming every prodlem- problem in modern life on a piece of technology. Sometimes you're tired. I get it. Sometimes you need to shut off your brain for a little while. Netflix and chill much?

Yeah, got it. Sometimes there's something genuinely interesting on your phone. Although, if your phone is more interesting than your spouse, you definitely need to work on your marriage some. But if night after night, the only quiet time you and your wife have together is spent sitting six feet apart, giving your attention to people who are not in the room, that repeated moment is building something, and not necessarily something good.

So what's the next decision? Not, [00:52:00] we're gonna completely transform our marriage. Like I said, way too big. Maybe two nights a week, the phones stay in the kitchen for the first 20 minutes after the kids are settled. 20 minutes. I'm not asking for a lifetime here. Talk, have a cup of coffee, sit outside, maybe a cup of tea if it's nighttime and you're caffeine sensitive.

Play a game. I don't care. Make out like you were teenagers. That's always a good way to spend 20 minutes with your wife. The goal is not to manufacture a magical evening. The goal is interrupting one pattern that is helping build something you said you do not want Take your health, for example. I don't want my physical capacity determining whether, what my family can and cannot do together.

Well, what reoccurring decision is helping create that? Maybe every time you think about exercise, you imagine needing an hour. Well, I don't have an hour, so, so you do nothing. It's a really common trap. This happens with men a lot. Your next decision might [00:53:00] be that after lunch on work days, you walk for 10 minutes.

That's it. 10 minutes. 10 minutes will not put you on the cover of Men's Health. You will not grace the cover of Maxim or any other men's magazine. You will survive the disappointment of not getting that magazine cover, I'm pretty sure, so that's okay. But 10 minutes is not nothing. More importantly, you're beginning to become a man who no longer automatically chooses nothing when the perfect option is not available.

That matters. Psychologists use the term implementation intention for a simple kind of planning that connects an action to a specific situation When this happens, I will do this. It's a formula, right? Not, "I need to work out more." Instead, "After lunch Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I will walk for 10 minutes." [00:54:00] Not, "I need to spend more time with my wife."

Instead, "Tuesdays and Thursdays when the kids are settled, the phones will stay in the kitchen for 20 minutes, and I'm just gonna spend time with my wife." Not, "I need to figure out my career." Instead, "Saturday morning at 9:00, I'm gonna spend 30 minutes researching one possible path out of the work I know I do not wanna keep doing."

The reason this helps is simple. You're removing another decision from the moment, because the moment is where we negotiate, and 9 times out of 10, it's where we lose the negotiation. The moment is when we're tired. The moment is where something else comes up. The moment is where we say, "I'll do it tomorrow."

The moment is not your friend when it comes to optimal anything. A specific decision made ahead of time gives you a better chance of acting when the moment arrives. It's not guaranteed. We're still [00:55:00] human. Plans gets interrupted. Kids get sick. Work blows up. You miss a day. The point is not to create another system you can fail at and then use as evidence against yourself.

Reasonable progress is interrupting the pattern more often than you used to. That's enough to begin changing direction. There's a passage in James that talks about being a doer and not only a hearer, and again, I don't think we need to make this more complicated than it is. Understanding something and acting on something are not the same thing.

You can listen to th- this entire episode, agree with every single word, tell me it was a great show, share it with somebody, without changing absolutely anything Now, I really do appreciate the share, but the idea only becomes useful in your life when it affects choice. That's why I don't wanna leave you with this episode with 12 new goals.

I don't even wanna leave you with 12 anti-goals. [00:56:00] Take one, one thing you do not want your life to become, one reocurring, reoccurring decision that is helping it become that thing you don't want it to become, and one small interruption you can make this week to stop that thing that's building that negative.

That's enough. I know it sounds complicated on the front. It's not. If you're thinking, "Brent, that seems almost too simple," good. Most of us don't need our next steps to be more complicated. That's why we try and break them down here. We need to stop dismissing small decisions because they do not feel important enough.

We're really bad about that as men. I know I am, and I'm assuming I'm not the only one, where it's the whole hour thing versus 10 minutes thing on the workout, right? Oh, I can't get a full one-hour workout, so I'm just not gonna do anything. That 10 minutes is valuable. A lot of times we go, "Oh, [00:57:00] well, that's not enough.

That's, that one small thing is not enough." That's the problem. A lot of life you do not want is being built in small decisions. Why would you assume the life you do want has to begin any differently than with small decisions? You do not need enough clarity to plan the next 10 years. You need enough clarity to stop repeating one decision that keeps taking you somewhere you do not wanna go.

So think back to where we started. Where do you wanna go for dinner? I don't know. What do you wanna do this weekend? Well, I have a list of things I need to do. What do you want out of life? This is where we get stuck. Maybe part of the reason we get stuck is we decided clarity only counts when it arrives as a complete answer.

We think we need a destination, the plan, the timeline, the goals, the steps. We want the whole map before we leave the driveway, but my life has not worked that way. [00:58:00] After my business didn't end the way I wanted them to, I didn't suddenly know what the future was gonna look like. I knew I didn't wanna go back.

That was not the whole answer. It did not tell me the business to build. It didn't guarantee the next thing would work. It didn't remove risk, and it did not make the road straight. It just gave me enough clarity to eliminate one direction, and then I had to make another decision and another.

A lot of those decisions did not make much sense as part of some big 10-year plan, 'cause I didn't have one. I was learning, I was building, I was eliminating things that didn't fit, and I was discovering things that did. And somewhere in the process, the road became a little clearer. Sometimes you discover what you want by building towards it.

Sometimes you discover it by finally refusing to keep building to what you already know you don't want. That's all an anti-goal needs to do for you. It doesn't have to become your identity. It doesn't define your future. It doesn't [00:59:00] have the answer to every question. It can simply help you stop pretending you have no direction because you can't see the whole road yet.

So here's what I, I'm gonna ask you to do. Sometimes in the next... Sometime in the next 24 hours, give yourself 10 minutes. You don't need an hour. You don't need a re- free, a new journal or to buy some special pens. You don't have to set up some kind of meditation center. 10 minutes, finish these four sentences I do not want my health to fill in the blank.

I do want... do not want my marriage or closest relationship to fill in the blank. I do not want my work and responsibilities to fill in the blank. I do not want to become a man who fill in the blank Look at what you wrote and choose the one that bothers you the most. Ask yourself, "What am I [01:00:00] currently doing that could help make that happen?"

Not what's wrong with the world, not what your boss is doing, not what your wife needs changed, not what your kids are doing. What you're doing that is helping build the thing you say you do not want. Then choose one small way to interrupt that pattern this week. That's your next move. You may not figure out exactly what you want tonight.

That's okay. But if you see one future you do not want, one pattern helping create it, and one decision you can make differently today, you're not standing still anymore. So make that choice. Then make another one tomorrow. And if you know a man who keeps saying, "I know something needs to change, but I don't know what I want," share this episode with them.

Maybe he doesn't n- need the whole answer either. Maybe he just needs a better place to start like you do. Because that's how we do it, one choice, one decision, one step better day by day. Be [01:01:00] better tomorrow because of what you do today, and I'll see you on the next one. The Driven to Thrive broadcast: purpose, growth, and lasting impact for men.

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