As I write out my goals for 2020, I’m struck by the difficulty of deciding on appropriate goals for an entire year. What can actually be accomplished in one year?

Should I set goals that might be too high? That are definitely too high? How will I feel if I don’t accomplish them? Generally, I don’t feel bad at all when I fail at goals – I think this is some type of protection mechanism – so why set them at all? Plus, in a year my trajectory could change. It certainly did in the last year.

For the first time in my life, I’m setting goals for both my business and personal life. Since becoming self-employed just over 6 months ago, the lines between career and personal life hardly exist. Sure, I used to have career goals, but it feels very different when I drive the work rather than having someone tell me what to do with my time.

This change is exciting, exhilarating, fabulous, and also frightening.

When I look back at what I have accomplished since quitting my last official job, I feel in some sense like I have accomplished little. But is it really? Or should I actually view it as quite a lot? I no longer have a good framework. How quickly should my businesses be growing? What could I have done to make them grow more quickly? Could I have kept up with any quicker of a pace anyway?

These uncertainties make the challenge of setting goals more difficult.

But deep down I know that our goals are what set our direction. I need to know what I’m working towards to plan how to get there. I may not have all of the information to plan for all the turns I will take to reach the end goal. With more information, the end goal could even change. But without it, I’m going nowhere, so I will take my best guess and continue heading towards that point as best as I can navigate.