Your Impossible Goal Is the Only One Worth Having

Why Impossible Goals Matter More Than Realistic Ones

For most of my life, I set goals the way most people do. I aimed for something big enough to stretch me but safe enough to feel achievable. The problem was that these goals never changed who I was. They never forced me to become someone new. They lived on paper, not in my daily actions. Over the past year, that changed. I learned from Dr. Benjamin Hardy (co-author of 10X Is Easier Than 2X) that the goals worth having are the ones that feel far too big, far too ambitious, and far too unrealistic. In other words, they are impossible goals.

What fascinated me was how my brain responded when the goal was truly impossible. Instead of negotiating with the future, I had to negotiate with myself. Impossible goals stripped away the luxury of long-term thinking and replaced it with urgency, clarity, and identity transformation. I began waking up differently, thinking differently, and making decisions with a sharper sense of purpose. The impossible forced me to confront who I needed to become, not what I needed to do.

An impossible goal becomes a mirror. It reflects the gap between who you are today and who you must become to achieve it. Far from discouraging, this reflection becomes liberating. It tells you that the only version of your life that is worth living is the one that demands your best. It took trial and error for me to grasp this, but once I did, everything about how I approached my life and business shifted.

Read on (or watch this YouTube video, or listen to this podcast episode) to learn exactly how you can harness the power of your impossible goals to change your business and your life.

What an Impossible Goal Really Means

When I use the term impossible goal, I do not mean a dream without structure or intention. I mean a goal that combines two specific elements. The first is a huge outcome that dwarfs anything you have achieved before. The second is a deadline so tight it feels uncomfortable. Without both elements, the goal is simply ambitious, not impossible. Ambition does not change you. Impossible does.

I started exploring what this meant in my own business. For years, I had wanted to serve a million dollars worth of clients in a year. It was a milestone that felt meaningful and symbolic. Yet despite wanting this for a long time, I never achieved it. Only when I realized that my deadline lacked urgency did I understand why. A one year timeline gave me emotional wiggle room. It did not challenge my identity. It allowed procrastination, hesitation, and doubt to creep in.

Once I compressed that timeline, something clicked. When the deadline moved from twelve months to six months, then to ninety days, my entire thought process transformed. Suddenly, every decision mattered more. Every conversation, every opportunity, and every hour carried weight. I stopped asking myself what I could do eventually and started asking what I could do now. That shift created a different version of me.

Why Tight Deadlines Transform Your Thinking

Deadlines are not neutral. They influence how you think, how you behave, and how you prioritize. When the deadline is long, you can afford to think passively. You can wait for inspiration or external validation. But when the deadline is short, you cannot afford that luxury. A tight deadline activates creativity, resourcefulness, and decisiveness. It forces you to innovate instead of operate on autopilot.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy argues that an impossible goal must have a maximum of three years, and even that might be too long. I found that one year was too generous for me, and even six months felt soft. Only when I dropped the timeline to ninety days did a profound internal shift take place. The question “How would I do this in a year?” became nearly irrelevant. The question “How would I do this in ninety days?” was the one that lit a fire in me.

The shorter the timeline, the faster your identity must evolve. You cannot rely on old habits or incremental progress when the finish line is close. You must become the future version of yourself immediately. This is why impossible goals work. They disrupt your internal clock. They compress your urgency. They push you to adopt new thinking patterns, new behaviors, and new energy. They awaken potential you did not know you had.

How Acting From the Goal Changes Everything

One of the most powerful lessons I learned is that you cannot act to the goal. You must act from the goal. Acting to the goal reinforces the idea that you do not yet have what you want. It positions you as someone chasing something external and distant. Acting from the goal does the opposite. It requires you to embody the person who already achieved the impossible.

To make this shift concrete, I wrote letters from my future self to my present self. It felt awkward at first, but it became one of the most transformative exercises of my life. These letters came from the version of me who had already served a million dollars worth of clients in ninety days. They told me how he felt, how he lived, how he made decisions, and how he prioritized energy and rest.

Reading those letters changed me. I saw in writing the person I needed to become. I saw how he slept, how he worked, how he planned his days, and how he protected his mental and emotional space. After doing this exercise at the ninety day mark, I repeated it at six months and one year. The longer the timeline, the more powerful the identity shift became. The more I wrote, the more I began to act as if I had already crossed the finish line.

This is when the impossible became tangible. Acting from the goal reframed everything. It shifted my energy from scarcity to abundance and from fear to clarity. Instead of worrying about how far I had to go, I began living in alignment with the version of myself who had already arrived.

Why Abundant Energy Is Essential for Impossible Goals

Achieving an impossible goal requires abundant energy. Without it, even the best strategy is useless. I learned this firsthand the morning I woke up overwhelmed by the size of my ninety day target. Instead of diving straight into work, I chose to cultivate energy first. That meant movement, meditation, journaling, and gratitude. It meant choosing a state of being before choosing a state of doing.

This routine changed the way I handled my days. Instead of reacting to stress, I created from abundance. Instead of letting scarcity dictate my actions, I anchored myself in purpose and clarity. My energy became a tool, not an afterthought. It elevated the quality of my work and the depth of my focus. It made me more resilient, more creative, and more aligned with my impossible goal.

Energy is not optional. It is the foundation. When your state of being is abundant, your actions reflect that abundance, and your results echo it. When your energy dips toward stress and scarcity, your decisions become smaller. They tighten your world instead of expanding it. Impossible goals require expansion. They require a daily commitment to showing up with the energy that matches the size of your ambition.

Why Your Impossible Goal Is the Only One Worth Having

If your goal does not change how you think, it is not an impossible goal. If it does not force you to become someone new, it is not big enough. Impossible goals demand more of you, but they also give more back. They reveal your highest potential. They compress your timeline, sharpen your focus, and teach you to create from your future, not your fear.

Your impossible goal is the only one worth having because it transforms you. It turns your life into a canvas for your potential. It makes every day meaningful. And it reminds you that you are built for more than small, reasonable dreams. You are built for the impossible.