The Road And The Mile Markers

I spent over ten years on the professional tennis tour, and if there is one thing that world runs on, it is goals. Reach this ranking by this date. Win this many matches by this season. Everything measured, everything timed, everything with a deadline attached. I watched players hit every target they set and still walk off the court empty. I watched others miss their targets and conclude they were worthless. It took me years to understand what was actually going on.

They had goals. They had no objective.

The two are not the same thing, though we use the words as if they were. A timed goal describes a measurable target with a deadline attached. An objective describes a direction and a reality you are building toward. 

A goal tells you whether you arrived. An objective tells you whether you are still walking the right road.

The goal expires the day it is met or missed. The objective keeps guiding you for years.

Here is why this matters far beyond sport. Most of us have built entire lives out of timed goals with no road underneath them. Lose the weight by summer. Hit the number by December. Get the house, the title, the ring, by the age we decided was the deadline. 

Each one arrives or it does not, and either way we are left standing in the same place, reaching for the next target, wondering why arriving never feels like arriving.

We have been sitting with Job this month, and I want you to see him through this lens. Job was the most goal-driven man in his world. Look at his mornings. Every day he had a goal, and every day he fulfilled it in his burnt offerings, sacrifice after sacrifice, covering even the sins his children might have committed without his knowing. 

Each completed offering handed him the feeling he was really after, the feeling of being in control.

That is the quiet seduction of a daily goal. It lets you believe you are holding the outcome in your own hands.

The very control he manufactured every morning is what he ended up losing, along with everything it was supposed to protect. His entire religion was a scoreboard, and by every measure on it he was winning. Then the storm came, and the scoreboard burned, and Job discovered that in all his years of perfect performance he had never once asked where the road was actually leading. He had heard rumours of God. He had never walked with him. All those completed goals, and no direction at all.

That is what a life of goals without an objective produces.

Motion without meaning. Achievement without becoming. Control that was never really ours.

When God finally speaks to Job, notice what he does not do. He does not hand Job a new list of targets.

He introduces himself.

He shows Job the wild, unmeasured, living world and in effect asks him a different kind of question. Not did you arrive, but do you know whose road you are on? 

Everything changes for Job in that moment, because relationship is not a goal you complete. It is a direction you walk in for the rest of your life.

Here is the deeper reason objectives change everything. When we set an objective, we are trusting that we have a partner. We believe God is working with us toward its fulfilment, which means the outcome no longer rests on our shoulders alone. We inherit the role of the conduit in the process rather than the conductor of it. 

The conduit's job is to stay open, stay real, and keep walking. When we approach it this way the picture that emerges is always bigger and richer than anything we could have drawn ourselves, because more than our own hands have been drawing it.

Goals work the other way. 

When we set a goal, we quietly appoint ourselves the conductor. We hold the baton, we set the tempo, we carry the whole performance. The result is almost always a smaller picture than the one we were made for, because it can only ever be as big as our own effort and imagination.

Yet, there is something else we hand over when we live this way, something far more costly than the outcome. When we work with goals, we often give them the right to tell us who we are and what our value is. 

The target becomes the judge. Hit it and you matter. Miss it and you do not.

That is exactly what I was watching all those years on the tour, players letting a number or a score board decide their worth by Sunday afternoon. Objectives work on us differently, because our attention is no longer fixed only on the outside result. It rests also, and more importantly, on the inner transformation the journey is supposed to create. This is because an objective does not tell you who you are.

It uncovers who you truly are, because the road is changing you as you walk it.

Goals measure what you produced. Objectives reveal what you are made of.

You can see the difference most clearly in how each one meets a problem. When we live by objectives, a problem arrives as an opportunity. It becomes a doorway where we get to discover the why? and the what? of our lives. Why is this here. What is it revealing. What is it inviting me to discover. 

When we live by goals, a problem is only ever a problem, an obstacle between us and the deadline, so we ask the smallest question available to us. How?. How do I fix it, how do I get around it, how do I get back on schedule.

The how keeps us moving. The why and the what let us grow.

There is a hidden mercy in objectives too. With no timeline to race against, there is no one to compete with. Comparison loses its grip, because you cannot compare roads the way you compare finish times. Your road is yours. Nobody else is walking it.

So let me ask you what I ask the people I work with. Underneath all your goals, what is the objective? Who are you uncovering while you are busy arriving?

If you cannot answer that, the goals are not serving you. You are serving them, and they are hard masters, because they always demand another deadline the moment one is met.

There is nothing wrong with timed goals.

I still use them, and I help my clients set them sometimes. They are useful the way mile markers are useful. They tell you how far you have come but they rarely ever tell you where you are going nor why.

Write the objective first. Let it describe the person you are building toward and the direction your life is created to face. Then let the goals line up behind it like markers along a road that is actually yours.

Job ended his story with double what he had before. He did not get it by finally hitting the right target.

He got it because a man who knows the road no longer wastes his gift on fear.

The objective was the relationship. Everything else followed, drawn by a hand bigger than his own.

So stop counting mile markers on a road you never chose so you can find your road first, and the One walking it with you.

With you on the journey,