Follow the Energy, Not the Dream

Whitney shared a confession in our last post about how she’s bad at setting goals.

It’s true. I can vouch for her on that.

But me? I’m great at it. For years, I’ve worked on different approaches to setting, tracking, and achieving goals for myself. At this point in my life, it feels strange not to have a goal or objective tied to just about everything I do.

But something big changed for me in 2025 that has me looking at how I approach goal setting in 2026 in a totally different way. This change came from some key lessons I learned from content we consumed, but more directly from the conversations we had with guests on our own podcast throughout the year.

In July last year, I had the thrill of sitting down with one of my favourite musicians, Bobby Alu, to chat with him about his craft of making music.

At one point in our conversation, Bobby was talking about taking these “rhythm quests,” where he takes an extended break from touring and writing to get away from the work for a while. When I asked him how he knows it’s time for one of these quests, he said:

“If it stops being fun, I pay attention, because that’s usually a sign that I’m forcing something.”

What struck me about this was the idea that Bobby’s default is to think of the work he does as being fun. When it stops being fun, he sees that as a problem.

For all of my life, I’ve felt like setting goals and going after them was a way to translate my energy into something productive. My default has always been to think about setting and pursuing goals as work. “Fun” would actually be the opposite of what pursuing an important goal would look like.

A similar idea came up in a conversation Whitney and I had with our new Swedish friend, Jon Nordström, back in November. In that conversation, we talked about how Jon turned a podcast about football into his full time job, and as we were digging into it, he said:

“People say they don’t have energy anymore. It’s not the coffee. It’s that you don’t do enough of what you actually care about.”

For most of my adult life, I prioritized a routine of four to five hours of sleep every night and litres of coffee every day to keep myself both awake and energized to pursue the work I had to do. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always really liked the work I’ve done. I’ve been lucky that way. But only rarely would I say that the work energized me. Most of the time, it was just a matter of seeing how far and how hard I could push myself to keep going.

A lot of the work we did this past year was analyzing and learning about what made people successful. One central idea came through that lined up perfectly with what Bobby and Jon were saying.

People doing really meaningful work in the world almost always love what they do, and they almost never do it to become rich and famous. They do it because they love it. No coffee required.

We’re taught to work hard now with the promise of having things to look forward to later in life, when we have more time, more money, and so on. So we make sacrifices. But as Bobby Alu shared, “Joy isn’t something you earn later. It’s part of the process.”

My goal for 2026 is to tune in to where my energy comes from, and then remind myself to have the courage to prioritize the time to pursue those things.

If you’d like to join me in this, here’s a quick exercise to leave you with.

Make two lists:

• List A: What gives me energy, even if it is something hard?

• List B: What drains my energy, even if I’m successful at it?

Then ask yourself two questions:

• For everything on List A, how much time am I dedicating to these things?

• For everything on List A, how might my life change if I dedicated one to two more hours each week to something on this list?

• For everything on List B, ask yourself: what could be reduced, delegated, or done differently so it drains a little less of my energy?

I still love the process of setting goals, because for me, having a goal helps keep me focused on where to invest my time and energy. But this year is going to be all about finding the courage to notice where my energy comes from and prioritizing that work as much as I can.

Who’s with me?