“There’s goal setting to and goal setting through… do we want to simply land the people on the moon? I would like to return them safely to Earth. When JFK said, “By the end of this decade, we will have landed a man on the moon and returned him safely to Earth,”… the most important part of that mission was the returning the person safely to Earth. That’s to and through: to the moon; through the moon was bringing the person back. So your goal wasn’t to make it to the NBA. Okay, so you got drafted, made it there on day one, and they cut you on day one. Is that what you actually wanted? No, what you wanted was to make it to the NBA and have a 10-, 12-, 15-year-long career where you were a leader on the team and you were a top producer as well. And then some people might go, ‘“’And I want to be the legend; I want to be the greatest of all time.’ Maybe that’s it.” — Todd Herman: The Power of Identity [The Knowledge Project Ep. 182]

Increasingly, my own goals fall into a five year plan. The five years are what I plan to do, year 5+ is my through. When I reach that point, I will arrive at a starting place, having finished the last five years of focused effort. As we know, the world throws all sorts of obstacles and surprises our way in the interim, but the point is make the journey and course-correct as necessary along the way.

Five years feels like a long time, but it flies by like all the rest. Knowing what our through is going to be is to have a vision for ourselves at that future point in our lives. From there we break down the years and months into a steady progression plan. What needs to be accomplished in the next 90 days? What needs to be accomplished in the next 30 days? And of course, this breaks all the way down to “what needs to be accomplished today?”

The thing about identifying the through is we aren’t simply reaching a goal and celebrating it, we’re identifying the true success metric of who we want to be on the other side of that goal. The goal isn’t to lose 20 pounds, but to be a fit person who can do the fun things in life now and who has laid the foundation for a healthier journey through that next phase of life and the one after that. The goal isn’t to write a single novel, it’s to establish an identity as a writer with a future body of work that spans the rest of our life. The through matters a great deal for us. What good is landing on the moon if you can’t finish the journey home safely again?

Big visions are fine things indeed, but once established, we must roll up our sleeves and get to work on crafting that vision into the piece of fine art we wish ourselves to be. We get lost in our day-to-day and need a vision to show our true north, but we won’t arrive there unless we take this next step and the one after that. Each step is a push on the flywheel, building momentum and the exhilaration of progress. All that momentum shouldn’t suddenly stop when we reach that goal, it should be the wind in our sails for what’s next. That’s the thrilling thing about designing the journey—when done well we may just yet make it a heck of a ride.