Stop Confusing Your Dreams with Your Goals

It’s not every day a bestselling author asks me for advice. But there I was, listening to one of the most widely read voices in self-help work through his anxiety about an upcoming book launch.

“I just really want it to work,” he told me. “I want it to reach the New York Times bestseller list. I want it to touch millions of lives, but what if people don’t know it exists?”

I listened intently. Then I told him: “Those aren’t goals. Those are dreams.”

The best-selling author looked at me in confusion. “What’s the difference?”

It’s a good question. All too often, we set our sights on an outcome and call it a goal. It’s easy to mistake the two — and in fact, I’d have thought the author, who is also my dad, would know better. Nir Eyal has spent a career studying human motivation. But even he loses sight of the difference. 

Earlier this year, we spent six hours on a road trip together, just before his latest book was coming out. We discussed why one of the most popular goal-setting frameworks was leaving him feeling stressed and doubtful, and then we came up with a new framework — one that connects decisions to outcomes and fosters a cycle that increases motivation.

The Misuse of SMART Goals

Many of us have been instructed to set what’s called “SMART goals”: They must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. 

Originally developed as a managerial tool, SMART goals were designed to help leaders write clear, accountable objectives within organizations. In its original form, the framework wasn’t about personal growth but execution. Notably, the “A” initially stood for Assignable, ensuring every goal had a clear owner. A typical example from the original, 1981 paper reads: “To develop … an inventory system that will reduce inventory costs by $1 million.” It’s concrete, measurable, time-bound, and clearly built for a business context.

Over time, SMART drifted. As it spread into personal productivity and self-help, a system designed to coordinate teams was repurposed as an ill-fitting motivational tool. SMART works best when the challenge is simply execution, where metrics and deadlines reduce ambiguity. Applied to personal goals, it can create a false sense of clarity, pushing people to define and measure outcomes that aren’t under their control.

In the end, SMART goals don’t fail because they’re wrong — they fail because they’re solving the wrong problem. My dad had set “hitting the New York Times bestseller list” as a SMART goal for his previous two books. But despite his best efforts, he’d failed to reach his goal both times, leaving him frustrated, discouraged, and fearful of what would happen to his latest book.

The Role of Control

After our conversations, we examined the research behind SMART goals, which is not as settled as its reputation suggests. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, whose landmark work on goal-setting theory established much of the scientific foundation for the field, convincingly demonstrated that specific and measurable goals lead to significantly better performance. However, the remaining components of SMART (achievable, relevant, and time-bound) are far more contested in the literature. Setting an achievable goal can inadvertently discourage long-term growth, and time-bound deadlines can paralyze progress.

More fundamentally, SMART goals do not distinguish between what is within your control and what is not.

Consider the goal of getting admitted to Harvard Business School. It clears every SMART hurdle; It’s specific, measurable, achievable with the right credentials, personally relevant, and time-bound by the application deadline. Yet, the ultimate decision lies with the admissions committee, meaning your effort is necessary but not sufficient.

Or consider a sales leader who sets a goal to close $2 million in new business this quarter. That’s a textbook SMART goal. And yet, closing that revenue hinges on many factors that ultimately lie outside the leader’s control. The goal, for all its precision, has built a dependence on someone else’s priorities. When we set goals that hinge on others’ choices, we build our sense of progress on shaky ground.

Don’t Make Your Dreams Your Goals

The first step toward fixing this is recognizing a distinction most goal-setting frameworks ignore entirely: the difference between a dream and a goal.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Epictetus described a “Dichotomy of Control,” asserting that we must distinguish between what is prohairetic (fully in our control) and aprohairetic (what is not).

Following this distinction, a dream is an outcome you desire but cannot fully control. Dreams involve other people, external circumstances, and the whims of timing and luck. By this definition, SMART goals can become dreams dressed up in quantitative trappings. My father’s aspiration to reach the New York Times bestseller list was genuine. However, it was a dream, not a goal.

In contrast, a true goal involves an outcome you can attain through your sustained effort alone, barring extenuating circumstances. You can dream of winning a marathon, but make a goal of training daily.

Research shows there is a psychological cost to blurring the distinction between dreams and goals. Research on self-determination theory by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan shows that when people perceive a clear connection between their effort and their outcomes, intrinsic motivation strengthens. When that connection breaks down, and effort doesn’t reliably produce progress, motivation deteriorates. The result is a vicious cycle in which diminished agency leads to reduced effort, which in turn produces worse outcomes, which reinforces the feeling of helplessness.

When goals are genuinely within our control — submitting X applications, exercising Y hours daily, making Z sales calls — the opposite cycle takes hold. Effort translates into visible progress, ensuring motivation compounds rather than erodes.

WISE Beats SMART

SMART goals are better than no goals at all, but we wanted to create something more grounded and realistic.

That’s why we came up with a framework we call “WISE goals”. This framework poses four questions and is designed to feed your motivation and thereby increase the likelihood of achieving your dreams:

Here are the questions:

W — Within your control?

Can you achieve this goal through your own effort, independent of others’ decisions? If the answer is no, reframe accordingly. Rather than setting a $2 million revenue target, aim to conduct 40 qualified discovery calls per month. Your efforts will likely raise your revenue, but you have not made your success dependent on others. 

I — Ignites new skills?

Good goals ignite the capabilities you need to be successful on your way to your target. 

Consider lottery winners. Research on jackpot winners suggests that large cash windfalls often only postpone financial ruin; big winners become significantly more likely to file for bankruptcy within three to five years. 

Building wealth through consistent, self-directed action and careful planning develops financial literacy, discipline, and decision-making skills. Dreams that suddenly come true without that preparation leave the dreamer unprepared to handle their good fortune.

S — Specific action?

Dreams are never guaranteed, but working on your goal should make them more probable. Locke and Latham’s research is unambiguous, showing specific goals outperform vague ones. Like SMART goals, this feature should be incorporated into the WISE framework.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that there is a Goldilocks principle at work. Goals that are too narrowly scoped, like “write for 15 minutes every morning,” can become monotonous checkbox exercises. Goals that are too broad, like “write more often,” become discouraging. The right goal is specific enough to guide daily action, but substantial enough that completing it feels like a genuine accomplishment.

E — Enough?

If you work toward this goal for months or years and the dream never materializes, will you be glad you pursued it anyway? If the process itself — the learning, the discipline, and the growth — holds real value, then the goal is sustainable. If you are pursuing it solely because you believe it will deliver some eventual outcome, you have made your motivation contingent on something you cannot control.

WISE Goals Raise the Bar

A reasonable skeptic might push back: Isn’t this just lowering your ambitions? Aren’t you telling people to stop holding themselves accountable for outcomes?

The answer is, in fact, the opposite. WISE goals raise the bar on personal accountability, precisely because they remove the escape that outcome-based goals provide.

When your goal is to close $2 million in new revenue, and you fall short, there is always someone or something to blame: the market was soft, a key deal collapsed, a competitor got lucky. External factors absorb the blame. However, when your goal is to conduct 40 qualified discovery calls, there is nowhere to hide. Either you put in the work, or you didn’t. WISE goals make excuses structurally impossible.

Putting WISE Goals Into Practice

The WISE framework does not guarantee that every dream comes true. Nothing can. However, by committing to goals that are within your control, that ignite new skills, that involve specific actions, and that are enough regardless of outcomes, you turn a dream into a plan.

When my father applied this thinking to his book launch, he set a dream of reaching the New York Times bestseller list and helping millions. However, he stopped confusing his dreams with his goals. While getting on the list may have been a SMART goal, it was not a WISE one. It perpetuated unnecessary suffering and stress, rather than motivating progress.

He replaced his outcome-based wishes with WISE goals, including writing a substantive article every week, pursuing all speaking and podcasting opportunities his schedule allowed, and continuing to deepen the research behind his ideas. He may have pursued similar actions with his prior SMART goal, but his mindset had completely shifted. WISE goals transformed his work from a borderline plea for external validation to an agentic mindset that fueled motivation.

By the time we pulled into the driveway, my father had stopped worrying about how many copies he would sell. His book did end up on the New York Times bestseller list, not because he dreamt it would, but because he took the actions that made that outcome more likely — without the unnecessary stress.