Last January, a business owner named Maria sat in my Boost Camp workshop with a notebook full of goals.

Amazing goals. Specific. Measurable. Time-bound. She'd done everything the books told her to do. Revenue targets. Customer acquisition numbers. Social media metrics. The whole SMART goals playbook.

Six months later, she was back. Same notebook. Different problem.

"I hit some of the numbers," she told me. "But my team is burned out. I'm working more hours than ever. And honestly? I'm not sure any of this matters."

Her goals were perfect.

Her business was struggling.

This conversation happens a lot more than you'd think.

When Perfect Goals Produce Terrible Results

Here's what I've learned about business goal-setting: Most of the advice we've received was designed for corporations with dedicated strategy teams, not for small businesses where the owner or leader wears seventeen hats and makes decisions between customer calls.

Some frameworks work great in boardrooms. Those same frameworks can fall apart in the real world where you're simultaneously the CEO, the customer service team, and the person unclogging the toilet.

But the problem runs deeper than just impractical advice.

The real issue is this: Traditional goal-setting treats businesses like machines you can program. Set the inputs, get the outputs. Write the goals, execute the plan, achieve the results.

Except businesses aren't machines.

They're living systems made of people. And people are organic. They’re unpredictable, adaptive, creative, sometimes brilliantly irrational. This might not sound that groundbreaking, but it's really important when you see that forcing human systems into mechanical frameworks results in one of two things happening:

1. The goals get quietly abandoned because they don't account for how work actually gets done

2. The team burns out trying to fit their organic reality into rigid targets that ignore how humans actually operate

Maria's problem wasn't that her goals were wrong. It was that they were designed for a machine, and she was running an organism.

Stop Treating Goals Like Engineering Problems

Before we fix goal-setting, we need to establish a definition of what goals are.

A goal is a desired outcome that wouldn't happen without some kind of intervention, and usually has some level of difficulty or complexity.

Simple enough. But here's what we usually miss:

Goal setting is organic. Business goals are achieved by humans. Without an understanding of how humans operate, goal setting and accomplishment becomes exponentially harder.

This isn't some touchy-feely insight. It's practical reality.

You can have the most sophisticated project management system in the world, but if your team doesn't naturally check it, they'll coordinate through Slack DMs and hallway conversations instead. You can plan a major product launch for December, but if half your team takes PTO during the holidays and the other half is mentally checked out, you're setting up for a scramble no one wants.

Every goal you set has to account for the humans who will actually do the work. Their energy levels. Their motivations. Their natural working rhythms. The other demands on their time.

Most goal-setting frameworks skip this entirely. And here's where it gets even more fundamental.

Finite vs. Infinite Games (And Why You're Probably Playing the Wrong One)

There's this idea that your business needs to "win." Beat the competition. Dominate the market. Crush your targets.

It sounds motivating. It's actively harmful.

Here's why: Finite games have winners, losers, and a finish line. Infinite games have no endpoint—the goal is to keep playing.

Your business isn't football. It's more like marriage, or parenting, or gardening. The goal isn't to win. The goal is to build something sustainable that adapts when conditions change, that doesn't collapse at the first obstacle, that creates value over time rather than extracting it all at once.

When you treat your business like a finite game, you optimize for short-term wins at the expense of long-term sustainability. You burn out your team chasing quarterly targets. You damage customer relationships hitting revenue goals. You sacrifice what makes your business special for metrics that don't actually matter.

Most goal-setting frameworks are designed for finite games. But you're playing an infinite one.

The Reality Check You Need Right Now

Pull out whatever goals you set for this year. Now ask yourself three questions:

1. Can you explain these goals to your team in 30 seconds or less?

If your goals require a PowerPoint to understand, they're too complicated. Goals should be clear enough that anyone can remember them and make decisions aligned with them. If you can't pass this test, your goals live in a document nobody reads.

2. Do your goals account for how humans actually work?

Look honestly. Do they assume consistent energy every day? No sick days or family emergencies? Instant process adoption? Perfect information? Linear progress with no setbacks?

If yes to any of these, you're using machine logic on human systems.

3. Are these goals you should want, or goals that actually matter?

Sometimes we set goals because everyone else in our industry has them. Because they sound impressive. Because we think we're "supposed to" care. Because they'd make us look successful.

But if achieving the goal wouldn't actually move your business forward or make your work more sustainable, why are you chasing it?

Maria's revenue target was a "should want" goal. It sounded right. But what she actually wanted was freedom—which meant building systems that let the business run without her, not just hitting bigger numbers.

What Happens Next

If your goals failed these tests, you're not alone. Most do.

You've been using frameworks that ignore how humans actually work—something bigger companies can absorb but you can't. There's no room for error when you're answering customer emails at 9pm.

Maria's back in business, by the way. Same ambition. Different goals.

She's not tracking revenue anymore. She's tracking "weeks without firefighting" and "systems that run without me." Her team checks a simple one-page dashboard every Monday—no project management software that nobody opens. When someone asks about progress, her whole team can explain where they're going in one sentence.

The business is growing faster now. Because the goals finally account for how humans actually work.

Next week: The Three Time Horizons framework—how to think about tomorrow, next year, and five years from now without losing your mind.

Do the 3-Question Audit: Pull out your current goals right now and run them through the three questions above. Be brutally honest. Write down what you discover. This 15-minute exercise will tell you more about why your goals aren't working than any workshop you've attended.

Track Your "Should Wants": For the next week, every time you make a business decision, ask: "Am I doing this because it matters, or because I think I'm supposed to?" Note the pattern. You might discover you're spending 60% of your time on goals you don't actually care about.

Talk to Your Team: If you have even one other person working with you, ask them to explain your business goals back to you. Don't correct them or clarify. Just listen. If they can't articulate them clearly, your goals aren't working—no matter how well-written they are.

"Am I treating my business like a machine I can program, or an organism I need to nurture?" This reveals whether you're using the right mental model. Machines need optimization. Organisms need conditions that allow them to thrive.

"If I achieved every goal I've set, would my business actually be better—or just bigger?" This exposes the difference between metrics that matter and metrics that merely look impressive. Growth without sustainability is just exhaustion with better numbers.

You're not programming a machine. You're cultivating an organism. The goals that actually work aren't the most sophisticated ones—they're the ones that account for how humans actually operate. Get this right, and goal-setting stops being a tool for organized burnout and starts being something that actually helps your business grow sustainably.