A New Generation of Goal-Setting, a Letter from Sierra

For seven years, I ran a goal-setting company while simultaneously teaching people to un-hear the word “goal” throughout the planner.

People came to MäksēLife for goals — that's the word the world gave them, so that's the word they searched, and the word we used. And then the real work began. In the trainings, the welcome videos, the community calls, I translated: you came here for goals — stay for the freedom. Stay for the permission to change your mind. Let something go in April without calling it failure. Adjust mid-year because your life adjusted mid-year. 

The tool itself was never the problem. From the first edition, the planner was built human-first — the weekly reflection, the honest check-ins, the permission written right into the pages. I stand behind every year of it. But the container it lived in (and the language of the goal-setting industry) required translation. And the translation happened after purchase. It asked people to invest hours before they could feel what we actually were.

The people who made it through that translation had their relationship with their own lives changed. Thousands of them. I've watched it for years.

It's the people who didn't make it through that I couldn't stop thinking about.

The ones the old language turned away

The messages that stuck in me like a splinter came from the people who turned around at the door: "I can't use MäksēLife — I'm too overwhelmed. I'm not a goal setter. I don't have time for that."

Every time, I wanted to say: but you're exactly who this is for. 

Somewhere along the way, performance culture handed you a loaded emotion about the act of designing your own life — which is something every human on this planet should be able to wake up excited about. You saw the word "goal" and you felt pressure before you ever opened a page, because of everything that word had already done to you.

I understood that feeling, because I'd lived it. I came up in the world of the goal-setting greats — the 5 a.m. wake-ups, the never-give-up-on-a-goal, the your-routines-dictate-your-life. And then I became a mother, and almost none of it was accessible to me anymore. I didn't have the resources to live like that. And the old paradigm had exactly one interpretation to offer: you're not doing enough. You lack discipline. Change yourself.

I didn't believe that about myself. And I refused to believe it about the people I was watching — people who weren't failing at goal setting, but were being failed by a framework that was never built with their lives in mind.

That way of thinking was making people sick. It was making people stop dreaming entirely. If setting a goal means signing up for shame when life happens, the safest move is to stop setting them. An entire industry built to help people grow was teaching them to avoid their own futures.

The stance

After twenty years of working with people and seven years of building this company, I'm no longer creating products that fit inside the old paradigm of goal setting. We’re building outside of it.

Traditional goal setting assumes you are well resourced. We assume you are not.

It assumes unlimited time, energy, money, and support — because it was largely designed by and for people who had all four. It assumes you're a hustler who values optimization, that your output is infinite and free. Our customers live in a modern world that drains their resources early and often. Just because you’re capable doesn’t mean you have capacity, and the old paradigm never accounted for the difference.

Modern life exploits your capabilities and ignores your capacity. So we built for capacity.

Traditional goal setting builds the human around the system. We build the system around the human.

If the system doesn't fit your life, the old world says the problem is you — more motivation, more discipline, more early mornings. We say the system was never neutral, and you were never the problem.

Traditional goal setting says the goal is the result. We say the goal is who you become in the process.

Whether you cross the finish line, change your mind halfway, or set the whole thing down — if you stayed in honest conversation with yourself, you grew. That growth is the actual point. A life that is self-authored — not run on a script handed down by family, culture, or expectation — is the achievement.

And to the skeptic who reads all this and says “This is just soft, some of us actually want to achieve things,” you can absolutely achieve things the old way. I have. I've had extreme success by those rules, and I grew up in poverty and have been homeless, so I know both ends of this road. 

But at what cost? 

Ignore your capacity, your body's signals, your relationships, your health — and everything you're building carries an expiration date. You'll pay the bill eventually; it usually arrives as burnout, a crisis, an unraveling that gets labeled your failure. Call it soft if you want. I call it the most practical thing I know. When you feel your best, you do your best, and we build the whole system around that.

That's the new generation of goal setting, and we’re done waiting for the rest of the industry to catch up.

What actually changes

I won't promise you a life overhaul in ninety days. You spent a lifetime learning to move through the world a certain way, and the world that shaped you is still out there. What I’ve seen happen, over and over, is this:

Ninety days in, on an ordinary Tuesday, you stop reading your tired days as failure and start reading them as information. It gets easier to say no to what doesn't align. You ask for support sooner. You stop treating your output as infinite and free — and when the cost of something stops fitting, you feel entitled to change it instead of being ashamed of it. Less weight from the old labels. More curiosity about what's possible. A little more of your own authority, in your own life.

That's what we're inviting you into. A system that feels like a soft place to land, one you never have to prove you’re worthy of, built by people who walked this road ahead of you and know exactly what the old way costs. 

We've always been this company; we're finally taking up the space to say it without translation…or apology.

Come back tomorrow as we reveal what we’ve been building for you.

— Sierra