What Was I Thinking? Why Smart People Say Yes to the Wrong Goals

How are you? Happy, happy, happy Friday. Come on in. Good to have you here today. So there's a certain kind of goal. I think I'm the only one who's ever talked about this.

I've never seen anybody else do it. In other words, I made this thing up. But I did it myself when I used to say, what was I thinking? What was I thinking?

And I began to call it a what was I thinking goal? It's like when you find yourself in a place and I go, oh, how did I get here, right? Ever happened to you? We'll talk about that today, how to avoid it, which is probably what you ought to be doing.

It is a daily boost from MotivationToMove.com, a positive boost you need every single day. A very simple mission here from me. It's I just want you to take control of your life, jump from where you are today to where you want to be.

I want you to build your business and your life. And yes, I do both. I do both. Some people just do one or the other. I just don't believe I can do one or the other because I know my people.

I know people I work with, my personal coaching clients, the people in my Face Your Passion group. I know that they have all these mind things going on, right? I know they have a life happening and trying to figure that stuff out. And I know they have a job or a business and they have to figure that out.

But in between is where the real mess happens. So I stay in the middle of both and sometimes in the middle of fitness as well. I just kind of work with the human. And currently today, as of 2026, most of the world is currently run by humans.

I'm not sure how long that's going to last. But it's working out that way today, at least anyway. Good to have you. My name is Scott Smith. Thank you for stopping by today.

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It's really crazy. It should be focused more. But that's what I do. These are cool people. And we've had many calls now, like three, I guess. And people are just lighting up.

My phone's lighting up right now. We have a call today and people are like, man, this is what I want to talk about. I can't wait to get in it and solve these problems. You should do it.

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Don't say I didn't tell you so, okay? So we've been there. We've done this, right? It's been, what, 2 o'clock in the morning? You're like laying there looking at the ceiling.

Maybe you're sitting in your car. You're going, man, how did I get here? What was I thinking? Nobody forced you to do anything. You got there voluntarily.

As I love to say to people often, it's self-inflicted. You did it yourself. And you probably did it knowing what the outcome was going to be. How many times have you done that?

I know I have. Listen, I'm just like you. That's why I have all these good ideas. You and I think exactly the same. We're the same. There's two kind of what was I thinking goals.

First off, the surprise kind. I think this is where you kind of end up somewhere you didn't plan. A little bit of expansion, got bigger, a partner, a client, something. It might have seemed like a good fit.

Something was going to work and suddenly you're at a place you never expected to be. What was I thinking? In that case, you probably weren't. Well, you were thinking something, but I don't know what it was.

What do you think I'm a mind reader? I can't do that. The other one is the one you saw coming. I'm really good at this one, by the way. You knew the cost.

You knew what it was going to be. You knew when you went in and you said yes anyway. Maybe you expanded your business before you should have. Maybe you met somebody and you went on that date and you're like, I probably shouldn't go, but this time will be different.

But you knew better, right? All kinds of things have happened. Again, I'm very good at this one. Kind of see it coming. Kind of know what it's going to be.

Kind of been there, done that, do it anyway. Now I laugh at it. I do. I knew when I got into it. I was going to do it anyway. It happens all the time.

So why do we do this? Why do smart people like you do this? There's some science behind it. First off, we're bad at protecting how we feel. Psychologists know this.

They call it effective forecasting. We overestimate how good the wind will feel and how we underestimate how the grind will cost us, right? We're not really good at it.

We think the future us has more time. Again, psychologists have studied this a lot. They call it the damn effect. We think that we have more time than we actually have to do things.

And we never know how much time we actually have. But no matter how old you are, you could be 50s and 60s, and you still think you have more time than you do. You've got to get kind of really old before you realize, oh, I don't have that much time. But up until a certain point, I'm going to think it's probably mid-70s based on what I've seen, maybe a little older than that.

You start feeling it sooner, but people in their mid-70s, they kind of figured it out at this point. Uh-oh, time is running out. Uh-oh. We underestimate how long things are going to take.

They call this a planning fallacy. You do it. You blow past deadlines all the time. My wife calls it Scott time. Whatever Scott says, triple the time.

Now, I don't believe her, although she'd been right every single time she said it, but I still don't believe her. It's not possible that everything takes three times longer than I thought it was going to take.

We stay too long once we started. In business, they call this the sunk cost trap. You know, you put a couple of years into something. You put a lot of money into something and you recognize, man, what was I thinking?

And you still stay. So my advice has always been on this. Before you start, picture how you're going to feel a year down the road and then ask, you know, whether you really want to get going. It's pretty simple, right?

One of the things I want to do is I want to feel the middle. I don't want to wait to the end. The destination is not where you're heading right now. The journey is the destination, as they say.

And it's mind science. Essentially, once your mind imagines what's going to happen, once you set that goal, your mind is like, cool, that's fun. The mind doesn't care if you do it or not. It's already excited about it.

Perception is reality. All the mind knows is perception, right? So technically speaking, the journey along the way, the middle ground is actually where the living and where the fun happens. So if you look at what you want to do in the middle sucks, don't do it.

It's okay if it's a grind. It's okay. But if you enjoy it, it's fine if you want to work hard. But if it's really where you don't want to be, it's not going to get any better.

That time has passed. It's just the truth, guys. Pretend it's next month. If somebody asks you to do something starting in 30 days, would you still say yes?

If not, your yes was depending on imaginary free time. Look at it as if you're going to start right now. Just look at it directly, okay? Run a pre-mortem, I should say.

A Gary Klein tool. Imagine it's a year from now. And it went badly. Write down why. You'll find that while there's still problems, they're cheap when you do it that way.

So it's a premortem. You're going to look at why it was bad. But that's not positive, Scott. We can't win if we're going to look at the bad stuff. Really?

Have you ever run a military operation? Probably not. But yeah, you're going to look at that contingency. What could go wrong? In our world, we call it a pre-planned response.

What could go right and wrong? We look at both. Name what you're trading. Every yes is a no to something. Time with your family, your health, your work.

Name it. What are you trading? If you're going to set a goal, you're trading something. I know you want to get something in the future. You're going to get something.

And it's very often worth the challenge. Listen, you're not going to get me to ever say that. We got to give up a lot to get what we want sometimes. And it's harder than we ever think.

In fact, I'm going to say it's probably harder all the time. It's never easy to get there. And you're giving up something, man. So what is it? And if you're going to give it up, would you still do it?

There are many, many times, like there's certain things I won't do because of my commitment to my family and my clients and things. I just won't do other things. I'm just not going to. It just won't happen.

It's like a value proposition. I have certain values in my life. You challenge my values. I don't want anything to do with you. Wish. Then think about the obstacle.

A lot of research shows that daydreaming about the outcome alone makes you less likely to get there. So picture the result and picture the obstacle and then decide. So this is back to what I talked about earlier.

The mind already kind of knows. So you want to kind of picture what it's supposed to be and then picture the obstacles along the way that are going to be there. If you're not willing to go through the obstacle, then don't do it.

Many, many times. There's a lot of things I don't do these days because I just understand the obstacles and the pain that it's going to be, and I just won't go through it. I'm like, it's a whole lot easier to choose another path that make me just much more happy. And sometimes it takes a while to figure out what you're willing to do and not willing to do.

I get it. When we're young, we just kind of do anything. You get a little bit older, you get a little wiser, and you think, you know, I just don't want to do that.

Let me stop for a second and say some of y'all got old and crotchety and you're only 38 years old. Go for it, goods. Go for it. Set an exit point before you start.

This is an interesting one. If something hasn't happened by a certain time, stop or change course. Decide in events while you're clear-headed, not when you're emotionally invested. I have projects going on right now.

that I have a very clear vision. I have a project called Face Your Passion. It's a group and we're coaching and there's a certain number of people need to be there to make this fiscally responsible for my time and everything else. There's a certain goal we have to hit.

And I have already said, if certain things don't happen in a certain time, I'm either going to drop it or I'm going to change. Don't know which it's going to be. Not going to tell you what my conditions are to that, but it's just being smart about things.

Now, having said that, I'm invested 100%. I'm going all out. I'm going to figure it out to get there to make it happen. That's what you do. But if we ever get to the point that I can't figure out how to get it or it's a drain on me or something else around me, it'll go away.

That's why you need to go this week. Go to Face Your Passion. Sign up so that I don't have to impose that on you. So the what was I thinking goal? I think if you take just a moment, maybe you should do that right now.

Maybe you should sit down and say, in the position you are right now, are you living in a what-was-I-thinking goal right now? Or is there something on your mind that you haven't even thought about the fact that maybe it's not where you want to end up anyway?

And maybe it's time to think, I don't want to say what was I thinking. Something to think about, right? Hey, listen, have a great weekend. Get signed up.

FaceYourPassion.com. I'll see you Monday morning, and the special's going to be gone. I won't even ever talk about it again. Yay! We'll be done.