The goal you set in January was written by a person who didn't know what was going to happen in March.
They didn't know about the job change, the illness, the thing that turned out to be more interesting than the plan. They set a sensible goal with the information they had, which was less information than you have now.
Holding yourself to their decision is a strange kind of loyalty, and it's the default.
Two failure modes, not one
Most writing on this picks a side, and both sides are half right.
The first failure is rigidity. Someone works towards a goal for two years after the reason for it evaporated, because it was written down and abandoning things feels like weakness. That produces a lot of wasted effort and a specific kind of misery — doing something diligently that you can no longer explain wanting.
The second is churn. Someone revises every six weeks, always for good reasons, and nothing accumulates. Each new version is better than the last, and none of them survives long enough to produce anything.
Both look like the right behaviour from inside. Rigidity feels like commitment. Churn feels like responsiveness. The trick is telling which one you're doing, and the answer isn't available from how it feels.
The test that separates them
Ask what changed — the circumstances, or your appetite for the difficult part?
If the circumstances changed, revise. You moved city, the market shifted, the person you were doing it with left, your health changed. The goal was a response to a situation and the situation is different. Rewriting it is maintenance, not failure.
If only your appetite changed, be careful. Every long project has a stretch where it stops being enjoyable and the end isn't visible, and during that stretch a revision will present itself with excellent reasoning attached. A goal reformulated at exactly the point it became difficult is usually avoidance wearing the clothes of good judgement.
The supporting question: does the new version require the same difficult thing, or has it quietly been removed? Build an audience first, then write the book is a legitimate strategy and also, quite often, a way of not writing the book.
What to revise and what to hold
Separating these makes the whole thing easier.
The method should change freely. How often, when, what the sessions look like, what tools you use — these are implementation and they should track your actual life. A schedule that made sense before the baby is not a commitment, it's a plan, and plans are supposed to be updated.
The scope should change with information. If you now know the thing is twice as big as you thought, say so. Holding a scope set in ignorance produces either failure or a rushed bad version.
The underlying want should change rarely, and when it does, that's a real event worth noticing rather than editing around. If you no longer want the thing, the honest move is deletion, not a reformulation that keeps the words and removes the substance.
Most bad revisions are underlying-want changes disguised as scope changes.
That disguise is worth learning to spot, because it's what allows a goal to persist for years in a form that's been hollowed out. The words stay recognisable — same project, same title — while each revision removes a little more of the part that would have made it matter. Read across four versions and the trajectory is obvious. Read one at a time, each looked entirely reasonable.
Where this gets misused
The counter-argument, since permission to revise is easily abused.
There's a version of this that becomes a policy of never being held to anything. Every goal is provisional, every plan is a hypothesis, and nothing is ever quite committed to — which sounds sophisticated and produces the same output as not having goals at all.
Commitment does real work. Some things only get finished because someone decided in advance that they would be, and then declined to reopen the question every time it got hard. A person who has never pushed through a bad stretch on principle has no evidence about what they're capable of.
The practical compromise: revise at scheduled points rather than whenever the question occurs to you. A review every couple of months where revision is allowed, and between those, the goal stands. That removes the ability to renegotiate on a bad Tuesday, which is when the worst revisions get made.
Three versions across a year
The goal in January is launch the consultancy properly — five retained clients by December.
In March she takes a contract that was meant to be two months and turns into eight. The circumstances have genuinely changed, and the honest revision is to scope: two retained clients by December, alongside the contract. Same want, adjusted for a fact she didn't have in January.
In July it's difficult. Approaching people is the part she dislikes and there's been one no. The revision that suggests itself is build the website and content first, then approach people in the autumn, which sounds strategic and removes the only difficult activity in the entire plan. She notices this, largely because it's the third time she's had the idea, and doesn't do it.
In October the contract ends and she has one retained client. The revision is to method: two approaches a week on Tuesdays, rather than the vague continuous effort that wasn't happening.
Three revisions in a year. Two were maintenance and one was avoidance, and telling them apart is the whole skill.
What the record makes visible
A revision made once is a decision. The same revision proposed four times is a pattern, and patterns are only visible if they were written down.
That's the practical reason to note changes on the goal rather than simply editing the text. July: considered doing the website first, decided that's avoidance is a line that costs eight seconds and stops the same idea arriving in September as though it were new.
The counter does the other half. A goal that's been rewritten more recently than it's been worked on will still show its real gap, because editing the text isn't contact with the work — which is the one thing that can't be argued with when the revision is the avoidance.
Between them they cover both failures. The gap catches the goal you've stopped touching. The record of revisions catches the goal you've been endlessly improving. Neither requires you to have been honest with yourself at the time, only to have written something down.
Related: The goal you keep rewriting instead of doing · Goals with no deadline · Quitting is a skill
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