Succeeding at things that don't matter is failing at life
How I plan my life — creating goals with soul.
We’re going on vacation tomorrow to meet up with my family. Since they’re arriving a day later and leaving a day earlier, I thought it would be a marvellous opportunity to use that time as a sort of life (and work) planning workshop — all while laying by the pool with a virgin mojito.
Of course, life is not a to-do list. It’s not a spreadsheet of checkboxes or a rigid calendar of obligations. At least, it’s not just that. But truth be told, I am a sucker for a to-do list, a productivity workshop, or any sort of time-management system. I am not an organised person, but trying to become an organised person makes me feel good.
I am 29 now. I am generally very happy with the way my life is turning out and yet there is this disconnect — 30 is just around the corner and I am not exactly where I thought I would be. And so what, right? I am aware that age is just a number. I am also aware how much we are influenced by society and the outside world. A lot of people go into their 30s with not as much as a blink, it is purely my own internalised fear that has absolutely no base in reality. If you are about to turn 30 or turned 30 already and have/had no antagonising feelings regarding that number, please know I am in awe and jealous of you.
Adrienne Maree Brown wrote, “I believe that all organizing is science fiction - that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” I truly can not agree more. I do however try to see the planning not as just about what happens next—but also about how I experience the now.
A few years ago, I stumbled across The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte, and it changed the way I view goal setting. I listened to an audiobook on long windy beach walks while in Spain — Danielle has the most beautiful voice. For the first time, I felt like someone had put words to what I’d always instinctively known: that chasing goals for the sake of achievement alone can and does feel hollow. What if, instead, we designed our lives based on how we want to feel?
Knowing how you actually want to feel is the most potent form of clarity that you can have. — Danielle LaPorte
It’s easier to think about it this way too. I don’t necessarily know what I want, but I usually do know how I want to feel.
I reread the book at the beginning of this year. Since then, I’ve been planning my life not around achievements, but around soulful alignment. Here’s how I do it.
Start with feelings, not just objectives.
In traditional goal-setting, you define what you want to do or get. But with The Desire Map as my guide, I start with this question: How do I want to feel in my life?
These are what LaPorte calls Core Desired Feelings. Mine shift from season to season, but they often sound like: happy, peaceful, secure, creative, free, inspired, loved.
I ask myself some questions:
What has brought me the most joy lately (life & work)?
When do I feel most in flow or alive?
What are the biggest frustrations?
What does a "10/10 life" look like for me?
How do I want to feel?
Everything else flows from there. It’s a very simple system: if a goal or habit doesn’t support those feelings, you let it go.
Epidemically often, we go for the external win at the cost of our internal wellness.
— Danielle LaPorte
What can you do to feel this way?
We wrote out a bunch of positive feelings, and then we asked ourselves, “So what can we do to feel that way?” In that simple question lay a new way of living life, which subtly and slowly led to profound changes in the way I went about getting things done.
— Danielle LaPorte
What makes me feel creative? What can I do to feel secure? What makes me happy?
To feel secure emotionally I need to have my finances in order. To have my finance in order I need to have several income streams. In order to do that I need to take on a certain number of projects and invest a certain amount of money. I of course want to have nice things and a nice life in general but my primary intention is feeling of security. Everything else is mostly a bonus.
I want to feel good in my body. To feel good in my body I need to move daily, drink plenty of water and get enough sleep. So now 30 minutes pilates daily in my to-do list has a meaning behind it. It’s not pilates for the sake of pilates. It’s pilates for the sake of feeling good.
What makes me feel creative and inspired is writing and food. I wrote here about becoming a mother and a fantasy of me baking a yogurt cake with my daughter. Even in my motherhood journey food is a connecting thread, so clearly I am onto something here. It’s something I still need to unpack. Ideally I would love to connect all of the dots into one beautiful life.
And so on and so forth.
Ask yourself: Why do you want what you want?
I try to at least understand if it’s for internal satisfaction or external validation. If it’s the later, I try to work through it. The work is quite often fruitless but knowing the why behind the what helps me keep myself in check and on track.
Choose a soulful theme for the season
Inspired by the Desire Map process, I now choose a soul theme for each season. These themes encapsulate the emotional energy I want to embody. It’s very similar to choosing a word of the year, as per ‘Design Your Day.’
Balance the practical with the poetic
Yes, I still set deadlines, write task lists, and plan projects. But now I pair every practical goal with a soul goal. Our feelings are not frivolous—they’re foundational to every single thing. Feelings are poetry. Feeling are what moving the world around. Behind every big thing is a big feeling.
A genius in every right, Audre Lorde, famously wrote: “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
I am aware Lorde wasn’t talking about goal setting, but that’s exactly how I feel — first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action, poetry can put into words inaccessible feelings, that’s why I read Mary Oliver, that’s why I read Octavia Butler (her list on what is sexy is poetry at its finest even thought it’s not trying to be it). Feelings become words become actions become life.
As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they ame after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of "it feels right to me." We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
— Audre Lorde
"It feels right to me" should be, perhaps, the only guiding compass when it comes to planning your life.
Design in seasons, not years
Year-long plans can feel too distant and rigid. Even though I do have a loose 5–10 year life plan (or rather, a life vision, a very colourful one with plenty of descriptions of how I spend my days), I prefer to break it into seasons—natural chapters of life that invite reflection, growth, and recalibration. For example, I’m about to have a baby — three months until she’s here. This season of my life is very different from the one before, and from the one that will follow, and rightfully so. My mind and my body need different things, I have a different level of energy, I have different priorities.
At the beginning of each new season, I sit down with my Core Desired Feelings and ask:
What would support these feelings right now?
What needs to shift?
What can I let go of?
This practice helps to plan with more presence, not pressure.
I also quite like “12 Weeks Year” as a planning system, I wrote about it here. You can adapt it to work with seasons. It’s more rigid but would most certainly work for some people, as it occasionally does for me.
Rituals and routines
Inspired by LaPorte’s emphasis on intention, I began trading rigid routines for meaningful rituals. Morning pages (free therapy!), long walks, lighting a candle before creative work—these simple acts root me in the moment and bring my desired feelings into daily life.
It took me some time to figure out my routines but I am almost there. For example, I can’t write in the evening. I am a morning person. The second the sun goes down, I am tired and have no inspiration. If I want to write I have to do it practically as soon as I wake up. Once I finally got it, it became easier. I was no longer torturing myself with a keyboard right before going to bed.
Celebrate soul wins, not just milestones
Accomplishments mean little if they don’t leave us feeling how we want to feel.
I put everything on paper. Every little thing I am proud of. Every creative thought, every little win.
Succeeding at things that don't matter is failing at life. I have to repeat that often to myself. Feeling good should always be the primary intention.