I used to ask people what they wanted.
Now I ask to see their calendar.
Goals are fiction. Calendars are nonfiction. One is what you hope happens. The other is what you’ve already decided will happen, whether you admit it or not.
I learned this the slow way, over coffee with a guy named Dev who ran a seed-stage fund and talked, constantly, about wanting to write more.
He had a book in him. He’d said so for three years.
I asked to see his week.
He pulled up his calendar like it was a confession he hadn’t meant to make.
Forty-one meetings. Four of them optional. None of them writing.
He looked almost betrayed by his own screen.
“I keep meaning to block time,” he said.
I told him meaning to isn’t a strategy. It’s a placeholder for a decision he hadn’t made yet.
Your calendar doesn’t care about your intentions.
It only records what you actually chose, over and over, in fifteen-minute increments.
That’s the part people don’t want to hear.
A goals list is aspirational. It’s you, at your most generous, im…
