There’s something deeply unsettling about focus. The way it narrows your vision, forces you to commit to one thing, to actually finish something—it’s honestly kind of limiting, don’t you think? Why put all your eggs in one basket when you could juggle fourteen baskets simultaneously while riding a unicycle through a wind tunnel?
Welcome to the enlightened path of radical goal diversification, where momentum is for suckers and completion is just another word for giving up on your other dreams.
The Philosophy of Perpetual Spinning
Let me tell you what the self-help gurus won’t: focusing on one goal at a time is for people with no imagination. You’re not some medieval peasant who can only hold one thought in their head. You’re a modern human with a smartphone, three streaming service subscriptions, and the attention span of a caffeinated hummingbird. You were built for this.
The beauty of pursuing fourteen goals simultaneously is that you’ll always have an excuse for why none of them are working. Your novel isn’t finished because you’re also learning Mandarin. Your Mandarin isn’t progressing because you’re training for a marathon. The marathon training is inconsistent because you’re launching a podcast. The podcast only has two episodes because you’re renovating your kitchen. The kitchen remains half-finished because, well, you’re writing a novel. It’s a perfect ecosystem of mutual impediment.
Setting Up Your Goal Buffet
First, you need to select your fourteen goals with care. The key is maximum diversity with zero synergy. You want goals that pull you in completely different directions, require entirely separate skill sets, and ideally, demand your attention at exactly the same time of day.
Here’s a starter pack to get you going:
Learn a musical instrument you’ve never touched. Bonus points if it’s something large and expensive that will take up physical space in your home as a monument to your ambition—a piano, perhaps, or a harp.
Start a business. Doesn’t matter what kind. The vaguer, the better. “E-commerce” or “consulting” works beautifully. Make sure it requires learning seventeen new software platforms.
Get in the best shape of your life. This should involve a complex routine that changes weekly based on whatever fitness influencer you most recently discovered. CrossFit on Mondays, yoga on Tuesdays, confusion every other day.
Write a book. Not just any book—something ambitious. A fantasy trilogy, maybe, or a comprehensive history of salt. Something that would take a focused person several years.
Master a new language. Pick one that uses a different alphabet than your native tongue. You’re not here to take the easy route.
Develop a meditation practice. This one’s delicious because it’s meant to bring you peace and clarity, which will make you acutely aware of the chaos you’re creating everywhere else.
Learn to code. All of it. Every language. Start with Python, then immediately get distracted by JavaScript, then wonder if you should have started with C++.
Renovate part of your living space. Knock down a wall. Build something. The goal is to ensure your physical environment matches the construction zone of your life.
Start a side hustle that’s completely unrelated to your main work. Ideally, this should involve Etsy, dropshipping, or teaching people something you learned on YouTube three weeks ago.
Build an investment portfolio from scratch. Spend forty hours researching stocks, then panic and put everything in index funds, then panic again and move it all to cryptocurrency, then back to researching stocks.
Volunteer for a cause. Pick something time-intensive that meets during your only free evening of the week.
Launch a creative project—photography, painting, pottery. Something that requires buying a lot of equipment that will eventually gather dust in your closet.
Network aggressively. Attend every event, accept every coffee invitation, join three professional organizations, and wonder why you never have time to do the work that would make networking worthwhile.
Finally, maintain a rigorous content creation schedule. Daily blog posts, weekly YouTube videos, a newsletter, and an active presence on four social media platforms. Document your journey of pursuing thirteen other goals while never actually completing any of them.
The Art of Horizontal Progress
Here’s what’s magical about this approach: you’ll always be busy. Exhausted, even. You can fill every waking hour with productive-seeming activity. You’ll have dozens of browser tabs open, multiple planners color-coded into oblivion, and a phone full of apps that promise to help you manage your unmanageable life.
You’ll experience what I call “horizontal progress”—moving constantly but never actually advancing. Think of it like a treadmill, except you’ve set up fourteen treadmills in a circle and you’re sprinting from one to the next, never spending enough time on any single one to break a sweat, but always feeling like you’re running.
The beauty is in the perpetual beginning. You know that exciting feeling when you start something new? That rush of possibility, that clean slate, that vision of who you’ll be once you’ve mastered this thing? With fourteen simultaneous goals, you get to live in that dopamine-rich state of perpetual initiation. You’re always a beginner, always optimistic, never burdened by the messy middle or the disappointing reality of what completion actually looks like.
The Excuse Economy
One underappreciated benefit of goal proliferation is the robust excuse economy you’ll develop. Every goal becomes an alibi for every other goal’s failure. This creates a kind of protective bubble around your ego. You’re not failing—you’re just busy. You’re not unfocused—you’re ambitious.
When someone asks about your novel, you can sigh meaningfully and mention the business you’re launching. When someone asks about the business, you can explain that you’ve been focused on your fitness transformation. When someone notices you haven’t actually lost any weight, you can discuss the volunteer work that’s been taking up your evenings. It’s a shell game, and you’re both the con artist and the mark.
The Productivity Porn Trap
Of course, pursuing fourteen goals requires the right tools. You’ll need apps—so many apps. Todoist for tasks, Notion for notes, Trello for projects, Forest for focus, Headspace for meditation, Duolingo for languages, MyFitnessPal for nutrition, and at least seven more that you’ll download, configure for three hours, use twice, and forget about.
You’ll need planners. Physical ones, because there’s something about writing things down, right? And digital ones, because you always have your phone. You’ll need a goal-setting framework—maybe OKRs, or SMART goals, or the 12-week year method. You’ll watch countless YouTube videos about morning routines, productivity hacks, and how successful people manage their time.
The irony, of course, is that all this meta-work about productivity becomes another goal that prevents you from actually doing anything productive. But that’s fine. You’re learning. You’re growing. You’re optimizing. The fact that you’re not actually producing anything is beside the point.
The Inevitable Collapse
Eventually, something will give. Maybe it’s a deadline you can’t dodge. Maybe it’s a depressive episode brought on by the dawning realization that you’re thirty-seven years old and haven’t finished anything since high school. Maybe it’s just exhaustion.
When the collapse comes, you’ll have two options. Option one: recognize that focus and momentum actually matter, that depth beats breadth, that finishing one thing is worth more than starting fourteen things. This option is boring and requires humility.
Option two is much better: burn it all down and start fresh with fourteen new goals. The problem wasn’t the strategy, after all—it was the specific goals you chose. This time will be different. This time you’ll pick goals that synergize better. This time you’ll be more organized. This time you’ll make it work.
And the beautiful thing? You probably will make it work—just long enough to convince yourself that you’ve cracked the code, that you’re different, that the rules don’t apply to you. Long enough to make it six weeks before the familiar pattern reasserts itself and you’re back to spinning in circles, busy but static, exhausted but unaccomplished.
The Grand Tradition
Take comfort in knowing you’re not alone. Millions of people are out there right now, juggling multiple goals, switching between projects like a DJ with ADHD, convinced that they’re just one productivity system away from making it all work. We’re all in this together, united in our commitment to never building momentum in any single direction.
So go ahead. Set those fourteen goals. Buy those planners. Download those apps. Tell yourself that this time is different. After all, if you never focus long enough to actually fail at something, did you really fail at all?
The answer is yes, obviously. But at least you’ll be too busy to notice.