How to Wake Up Excited About Your Goals - Chris Bailey - #1077

Modern Wisdom

Chris Williamson

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.6 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2026

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Chris Bailey is a productivity expert, speaker, and author. How do you make goals actually stick? We all want better for ourselves, but most goals fade. So how do you set goals that excite you—and actually follow through? Expect to learn why some goals feel effortless and others feel like a chore, how the role of intentions plays into goal setting and how to stack them, what the practical differences are between default intentions and deliberate intentions, why SMART goals are overrated, what the big triggers of procrastination and aversion are and how to overcome them, how you can make your goals feel deeper and intention stickier and much more… Timestamps: (0:00) Why Do Your Goals Start to Feel Meaningless? (3:40) Goals vs Values: What Really Drives You? (9:06) How To Align Your Goals With What Matters (14:39) Why You Should Constantly Rewrite Your Goals (18:29) Default vs Deliberate Intentions: What’s the Difference? (20:35) Where Your Default Intentions Come From (28:14) Are “Realistic” Goals Holding You Back? (32:53) How Procrastination Destroys Your Goals (35:54) The Easiest Ways to Beat Procrastination (45:12) Are Ugly Goals Still Worth Pursuing? (48:55) Are Your Goals Actually Yours… Or Someone Else’s? (54:13) How to Build Deeper Goals (57:34) Designing Intentions That Actually Stick (01:04:50) The Biggest Thing You’re Overlooking (01:08:30) Where to Find Chris Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get up to 20% off the leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Given all of the work that you've done, why is it that some goals feel effortless and others feel
0:06.6	like a chore? Yeah, it's such an interesting question. And that was what I wanted to figure out with
0:13.2	this book, because I find with my own life, I'm productive on a daily basis. I'm focused on a daily,
0:18.5	as you would hope, given I study this stuff for a living,
0:21.6	looking at the research for this stuff for a living. But there were still goals that kind of fell
0:27.9	by the wayside for me. You know, exercise equipment that was in the basement that I hadn't really
0:34.1	followed through with, you know, things that didn't really fire me up inside
0:37.8	that I found that I wasn't really accomplishing. And so that was what set me on this journey
0:42.9	to write this book, is seeing that we all have a sort of graveyard of forgotten goals. Every
0:49.7	single person on the planet does. And so what is it that actually separates the goals that we're
0:55.9	able to achieve and follow through with from the ones that were not? And when you dig into
1:02.7	the research on this topic, so I dug into the academic literature on this topic, I actually
1:07.3	spoke with a lot of Buddhist monks who know more about intentionality than almost
1:13.6	any demographic, I would argue, even the scientists that study intentionality and goal attainment,
1:19.6	all in an effort to untangle that web of essentially goal attainment, right?
1:26.1	Why is it that we attain some goals and others, they feel meaningless, we procrastinate on them,
1:31.9	that we kick them down the street for another day, or they're just not something that fires us up inside.
1:39.0	And so you discover a web of factors.
1:41.5	You discover, you know, procrastination is one angle, right? We procrastinate
1:47.3	on some things when we follow through on others. Values are another angle, actually, where, you know,
1:52.5	values my eyes have always glazed over when I've heard that, are you drinking there, by the way,
1:56.3	it looks good. This is a pretty looking can. This is one of the rare times that I'm drinking something that
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