PANews published a Chinese translation of Dan Koe’s newest long essay. Its core claim is blunt: people who keep choosing “realistic” goals often drift into failure or mediocrity, while goals that look impossible right now can redirect an entire life.
Three situations Koe says many people recognize
Koe starts with three patterns he thinks a lot of people will recognize.
First: the uneasy sense that someone else sold you the script for a “good life.” You chase a goal that sounds respectable at the dinner table and keeps your parents from thinking you blew it, yet you still cannot picture where it actually goes. Ignore that feeling, he says, and 10 years later you might wake up with a degree, a decent job, and a quiet despair that the dream that was actually yours is no longer within reach.
Second: working hard without moving toward anything definite. You wake up early. You listen to podcasts, journal, lift weights, pack the calendar. Busy, busy. And still, you do not know where you are headed. Five years from now, Koe says, you may still be repeating that you are trying to figure out what your life is supposed to be.
Third: ambition kept hidden because saying it out loud feels embarrassing. You want an unusual life. You do not want to end up like everybody else. But when people ask about your future, you trim the goal down before speaking it, just enough to avoid being laughed at. Koe calls that a form of mental self-indulgence: feeling special because you want something different while continuing to do exactly what everyone else does.
He says nobody wants to end up in any of those three states. That, in his framing, is what the essay is trying to resist.
His central pattern among highly successful people
Koe says one of his favorite things to do is study successful people and compare how they behave with ordinary people. Success, as he puts it, comes from doing more of what points toward it and less of what points toward mediocrity.
When he reverse-engineers people who pulled off what once looked impossible — including Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and some of history’s most famous creators, thinkers, and builders — he says he keeps finding the same pattern: their goals are wild. Unrealistic, even. And to him, that is not the problem. That is the whole point.
From there, the essay says it will explain four things: why ordinary goals fail, what psychological mechanism sits behind unrealistic goals, how to step into the same “reality” as extremely successful people, and how to get results most people write off as impossible.
Why “realistic” goals lead to failure and mediocrity
Koe opens this section with a quote attributed to Elon Musk: “The most common mistake of a smart engineer is optimizing something that should not exist in the first place.” He uses that line to argue that people often polish systems, routines, and ambitions they never should have accepted at all.
His argument is that people always have goals, even when they never consciously chose them. That is just how the brain works. Once you see that, he says, it becomes easier to understand why so many stated goals never last.
He separates surface goals from deeper unconscious ones. Surface goals are things like New Year’s resolutions or plans made during a brief spike of discomfort — deciding to get in shape after catching your reflection in the mirror, for example. Those fade fast. Underneath, Koe says, there is usually a stronger target: comfort, convenience, staying unnoticed. That hidden goal outranks the visible one.
Every thought and every action, he writes, moves toward something, like a heat-seeking missile. The real issue is that many people are optimizing for a goal they never picked, or one somebody else picked for them.
He lays that process over a familiar life script. You are born. Your first goal is survival. Your parents already have ideas about what you should aim at. They teach you to walk and talk, then later hand down their version of a successful life. Often, he says, that template comes from society: go to school, then get a good job. So you go to school, then university, because that is what comes next. You get work, tick off one milestone after another, and only after a big chunk of your life is already committed do you start wondering whether any of it was what you wanted.
Koe brings in entropy, then “psychological entropy.” Systems drift toward disorder, he says, and human thought and life do too. At a certain point, a system stops holding together and needs a new, more ordered structure. He compares it to water from a faucet eventually forming a whirlpool. In life, the lower self wants to keep everything the same, while the higher self wants more. Split down the middle. For him, that split is the sign that a total change is needed.
His attack on realistic goals is not just that they are too small. It is that people choose them by first looking at what seems possible, then shaving the target down a bit more so nobody laughs. In his view, a goal feels “realistic” when it matches what your parents, teachers, or the five people closest to you already expected from your life.
That is why, he says, the mind sits inside a cage. Stay there and you will not just miss life-changing opportunities — you may not even see them when they show up. Then life gets worse gradually, until the pain is big enough that it either crushes you or forces you to chase a goal that sounds ridiculous.
The psychology behind unrealistic goals
Here Koe quotes Maxwell Maltz: “A person who believes he is ‘meant to fail’ will, no matter how good his intentions are or how strong his willpower is, always find some way to make himself fail — even if the opportunity is handed directly to him. A person who defines himself as ‘a victim of injustice’ and believes that ‘he is destined to suffer’ will also always find a way to produce circumstances that confirm that belief.”
He says the trait that really sets humans apart is not just memory, consciousness, or intelligence. It is the ability to simulate the future and let that imagined future steer the present. In his model, the future shapes present behavior more than the past does. It is not that actions first build the future. First a person creates an image of the future, then starts moving toward it.
He calls the mechanism selective attention. The brain is either yanked around by incoming stimuli or directed by a goal. Focus on one thing and, by definition, you are ignoring 99.99% of everything else you could have noticed.
Koe’s view is that attention should be directed by a goal, not dragged around by cheap dopamine hits. An unrealistic goal, he says, forces that shift.
Tommy and Johnny
To make it concrete, Koe sets up two imaginary people.
Tommy wants what lots of people want: go to school, get educated, land a respectable job, eventually afford a nice apartment, and stack enough status symbols to attract a partner.
Johnny wants something that sounds absurd: build a content business earning $100,000 a month within 6 months.
Koe asks whether Tommy could still wind up making far more money than a respectable job would usually pay, or learn things outside school that would open a better opportunity. His answer is no. Tommy’s attention will not be filtering for those signals. Even if life-changing information lands right in front of him, his brain may toss it out as noise because it does not serve the goal he is already chasing.
Johnny is different. To reach a goal that aggressive, he cannot keep thinking like an average person. He starts noticing that most of what he does is useless. A well-built unrealistic goal, Koe says, shoves the brain into the unknown and speeds up neuroplasticity.
Repetition can strengthen neural pathways, he writes, but novelty and challenge trigger learning and change faster. Throw yourself fully at a new target and the brain gets forced into unfamiliar territory. It does not have many options. It has to rewire quickly, and over time those new behaviors become the new baseline.
At that point, he says, flow and obsession start working together. And life begins to feel distinctly pleasurable.
Five internal drivers
Koe says five internal drivers begin stacking on top of each other during that process:
- Curiosity: the urge to explore the unknown, learn how to change yourself, and close knowledge gaps. He links that to dopamine from novelty and norepinephrine, which gets the mind ready to pay attention.
- Passion: a growing attachment to the path that could change your life. He says that brings more dopamine and norepinephrine too.
- Purpose: the feeling that your actions serve something bigger than you. Achieving goals reinforces behavior with dopamine, while meaning and belonging bring serotonin, and human connection brings oxytocin.
- Autonomy: the desire to control your own life and work, decide what choices to make, what actions to take, and what environment to be in. Koe says that adds more dopamine while lowering cortisol because the stress of being “stuck in a box” fades, leaving better conditions for creative decisions.
- Mastery: learning and growth become rewarding by themselves. He describes that as sustainable “good” dopamine that keeps a person in the game over time.
He then turns to the obvious objection: plenty of people have set ambitious goals before and watched nothing happen. Koe’s answer is that a goal needs “gravity.” It has to matter so much that almost everything else in life starts to look trivial or pointless next to it.
He says that is hard. He also says he plans to write another letter focused specifically on how to become deeply attached to a life-changing goal. For now, he moves on to the mechanics of setting one the right way.
How to enter the same world as highly successful people
Koe opens this section with a quote from Anthony de Mello: “Every great idea is first seen as blasphemy.”
Then he shifts to Steve Jobs. Jobs, Koe writes, could walk into a room and announce a deadline that sounded impossible or a product that seemed impossible to build, and say it in the tone of someone stating settled fact: “We’re shipping in January, and it has to do these things.”
According to Koe, Jobs projected certainty so strongly that engineers who knew the request was impossible would leave the room believing it anyway, then start treating it like a real plan. That is the famous Reality Distortion Field.
Most people explain that away as charisma, manipulation, or bad behavior, Koe says. He reads it differently. Jobs was resetting the room’s attention. He refused to let the present constraint — this timeline cannot be met — dominate perception. Instead, he laid a future target on top of it. Once that happened, everyone’s mind started searching for how it could be done rather than why it could not.
For Koe, that is the key. A goal is not mainly a destination. He says that standard self-help framing is one of the most misleading ones out there. A goal is a filter that tells the brain what matters and what can be ignored. It is a lens for seeing the world. Whether the exact target gets hit matters less than the fact that a person will land somewhere near it, and that alone can produce progress that once seemed unimaginable.
How Koe says to set an unrealistic goal
He breaks the process into three steps and tells readers to write them down in a notebook.
Step one: install a new lens
First, choose a goal so big it feels impossible. Then give it a deadline so short that it feels impossible too.
If you do not know what your goal is — or even what your life should be about — Koe suggests starting with the most painful problem in your life right now, especially one whose solution would make a lot of other problems easier. For most people, he says, that is usually physical condition or finances.
He gives two examples. Going to the gym and losing 20 pounds can sharply raise confidence and energy, which makes it easier to regain control of life. Earning more money can reduce stress, widen your thinking, and give you resources to invest in other areas.
At this stage, he says, you do not even need to know how you will do it. Just setting the goal starts the brain searching for ways to reach it.
Then comes the test: is the goal and deadline you just picked truly impossible for the person you are right now? Put another way, can your current methods get you there? If the answer is yes, Koe says, then the target is linear, not truly impossible, and should be thrown out for a higher one.
The goal has to exceed your current skills, habits, and assumptions about what is possible. Only then can it create a new lens that makes the world look different, instead of just generating another to-do list.
He adds two more conditions. The goal must be singular. And it must be self-chosen. You cannot hold several competing goals at once because attention will splinter and no real lens will form. And the target cannot be inherited from parents, culture, industry, or the algorithm.
For Koe, the real moment of goal selection arrives when you can say with certainty, “This is what I do.” The second that happens, he writes, you start seeing that most of what you are doing now has nothing to do with it. He calls that entry into the unknown one of the most meaningful places in life.
Step two: set standards around what you will not do
If an unrealistic goal is set properly, almost everything you are doing now probably will not help you reach it. That is why Koe says you need to audit your life completely: habits, projects, clients, relationships, routines, responsibilities. Check each one against the goal. He expects most of them to fail.
He calls this the hardest step.
The job here is to build standards you do not lower. These are the things you will stop doing entirely. Not “mostly” stop going out on weekends. Not “mostly” stop taking freelance work at prices that are too low. Gone means gone.
Koe says people struggle here because of sunk cost bias, fear, and weak constraints. In his telling, the brain is a machine for self-deception, and people are extremely good at lying to themselves. This stage demands ruthless honesty and, often, ripping off several bandages at once.
Once standards go up, he says, life can get much simpler. Fewer possessions. Fewer obligations. Fewer excuses. The clutter that used to block clear action disappears.
Step three: focus on the highest-leverage path you can find
In the third step, the goal creates a frame that helps you notice new opportunities, while the standards strip away what does not serve the goal and make room for attention to move in the right direction. The next thing to accept, he says, is that only a few real paths can deliver the target.
You will not see the full path at the beginning, and a perfectly prepared mentor or opportunity is not just going to show up.
Koe illustrates this with fitness. An unrealistic goal could be entering a bodybuilding competition in 6 months or hitting a 405-pound squat for the first time this year.
Set a target like that, he says, and attention changes right away. The old linear path — train, lift, repeat — stops being enough. Structure becomes necessary. You may need a coach to get onto the right track fast. Your plan has to be built around the sets, reps, and movements that serve the goal. Sleep and diet become strict non-negotiables. Before that, he argues, the earlier goal would have filtered those factors out as noise.
Then he gives his own business example. When he decided to reach his first $100,000 month, he says he was a freelancer making less than $100,000 a year, with income tightly limited by his time and only around 1,000 followers on social media. In his view, there was no chance of getting there by doing what everybody else was doing — posting consistently and hoping the algorithm noticed him.
He needed leverage with multiplication effects. That meant a stronger product and service structure, so the content itself was no longer the product but the distribution channel around something people would actually pay for. His 1,000 followers were not enough, so he needed someone else’s distribution. In practice, that meant building relationships and exchanging value with a person who had 50,000 followers so that person would share his work with their audience and bring more buyers into the product.
Koe closes by saying that once attention is concentrated on a single goal, a person has already moved past 99% of humanity in discipline. More than that, he says, the state is enjoyable and may be one of the most pleasurable experiences available. If it does not feel that way, then some other problem still needs solving.
The essay ends with a preview of the next letter, where he plans to explain how to add “gravity” to a goal so it becomes too important not to pursue.