The Deal With Ideals

Every year, around this time, you write a version of the same list.

This year I will make $10,000 a month.
I will get thousands of views on everything I write.
I will have hundreds of people in my community.
I will be the best product manager in the country.

Read it back and you already feel the problem. None of it is realistic. And that is not a flaw in the list. That is the whole point of it. Because those were never targets. Setting high ideals like these is a different exercise entirely, and ideals have a completely different job than targets do.

Ideals Are Supposed to Be Impossible

A target is something you plan to hit. You break it down, you resource it, you hold yourself to it, and if you miss it, something went wrong.

An ideal does not work that way. An ideal is the far edge of what you can imagine wanting, set on purpose just past your reach. It is meant to be impossible, at least for now, and staying out of reach for a while is a feature, not a bug.

We get into trouble the moment we confuse the two. Treat an ideal like a target and every year becomes a referendum on your failure, because of course you did not become the best in the country in 12 months. Understand that the ideal was designed to be unreachable, and missing it stops being a verdict and starts being the mechanism. You aimed at the ceiling. You did not touch it. You still ended up higher than if you had aimed at the floor.

“Never Compromise on Your Ideals” Is a Lie

There is a piece of advice that sounds noble and quietly ruins people. Never compromise on your ideals.

Whoever told you that either got extremely lucky, or forgot where they came from.

There is one thing nobody who has “made it” likes to admit. The path there was one long series of compromises. The smaller client. The boring contract taken because rent was due. The piece published good enough instead of perfect. The version shipped while you were still a little embarrassed by it. Success has a strange way of erasing all of that. From the outside it looks like a straight line held to a spotless standard. From the inside it was a thousand small settlements made to keep moving.

I have written before about how much of “making it” is luck that people rebrand as principle after the fact. This is the same trap. The people preaching “never compromise” are describing a path they did not actually walk. You will compromise, constantly. Settling for less along the way is how anyone gets anywhere near an ideal in the first place. It was never a betrayal of it.

The Imposter Tax of High Ideals

Now the part that actually hurts.

Setting high ideals has a cost, and the cost is that you will feel like a fraud for most of the year.

When your bar is “best in the country” and your reality is a decent month and a couple of good pieces, that gap sits there every day, whispering that you are not enough. High ideals are a machine for manufacturing imposter syndrome. The better your taste, the higher your ideal. The higher your ideal, the more permanently you fall short of it. That is what a very tall ceiling does to an honest person looking up at it, and it has almost nothing to do with a lack of skill.

So there are two truths about high ideals, and you have to hold both at once. They push you to do the maximum you are capable of. And they will make you feel like you are failing the entire time you are doing it. You do not get the first without the second. The pull upward and the ache of the gap are the same force.

Lowering the ideal to feel better is the wrong response. Keep the ideal. Just stop letting the gap decide how you feel about yourself.

Your “Less” Is More Than Most People’s “Most”

The reframe that got me through it is simple.

When you set a high ideal and fall short, you land at your “less.” A version of the year that disappointed you, that came in miles below the mark you set in January.

Now zoom out. Your “less,” the version that felt like a failure, is very often more than what most people put down as their ideal in the first place. The month that felt like a letdown to you is the month someone else is quietly dreaming about. The gap you are ashamed of is a gap most people never get close enough to feel.

That should stop you beating yourself up, not make you smug. You are measuring your reality against your ceiling, which is exactly right for growth and exactly wrong for deciding whether you are okay. Both scales are valid. Just stop using the growth scale to judge your worth. Falling short of a big ideal is a better life than comfortably hitting a small one, and you are allowed to feel that on the days the gap gets loud.

Consistency Is the Only Thing That Compounds

So if you are going to miss your ideals every year on purpose, what actually decides whether you get anywhere?

The same boring answer it always is. Consistency.

It is not the intensity of the ideal, and not the burst of inspiration you feel writing the list in January, because that spark runs out by February. What compounds is that you keep setting a target you cannot meet, keep swinging at it, and keep getting a little better in the process. 1 percent better than last year is not nothing. Stacked over a decade, 1 percent on repeat is the entire thing.

This is also why I am wary of the wait-until-it-is-perfect instinct, which is usually just an ideal used as an excuse. The ideal is meant to pull you into motion, not freeze you until you can meet it. The day your high standard stops you from shipping, it has quietly flipped from a pull into a wall.

Set the impossible number. Chase it. Miss it. Notice you still moved. The reach, the income, the way you think about a figure in a bank account, all of it tends to follow the person who kept showing up, not the person who set the highest bar and quit the moment they could not clear it.

Set It, and Miss It on Purpose

So, the deal with ideals.

They are meant to be impossible. They are supposed to embarrass you a little. And anyone who tells you to never compromise on them is selling a version of their story that never happened.

Set high ideals anyway. Aim at the ceiling knowing you will not touch it this year. Let your “less” quietly become more than most people’s most. And in the end, measure yourself not by whether you hit the ideal, but by whether you were still swinging at it when the year ran out.

With or without my help – I wish you the best.

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