Here is a shift I am making as I head into my fifties.
I am separating my aspirations from my goals.
An aspiration is the outcome I want. I do not control it. A goal is the work I put in. I control that completely.
For most of my life I have called both of them “goals,” and then felt like a failure when the outcome did not show up on schedule. Turns out I was grading myself on the weather.
Let me be honest about how long it took me to see this distinction, because it should have been obvious sooner.
You have read forty-two posts now about a woman who works hard, prepares thoroughly, and shows up excellently. What you have not always read, because I did not always understand it myself, is how much of my private disappointment over the years came from expecting that effort to guarantee an outcome. The startup that did not become a company. The season that has still not lifted, no matter how faithfully I have shown up in it. The years I spent measuring my worth by results that were never entirely mine to produce.
I was doing the work and then holding myself accountable for the weather. That is not discipline. That is a quiet, exhausting form of self-punishment dressed up as ambition.
Some examples of the difference, since it is easier to see once it is broken apart.
Aspiration: grow this blog into something people actually wait for. Goal: publish one thoughtful piece every week, no matter who reads it.
Aspiration: be a voice people trust on African fintech and introverted leadership. Goal: say yes to every speaking room that fits, and show up prepared.
Aspiration: be fit at 60, not just fine at 50. Goal: move my body four times a week. Not perfectly. Just consistently.
Notice what changes in each pair. The aspiration is large, slightly out of reach, and entirely dependent on factors I do not control: whether readers show up, whether the right rooms open, whether my body responds the way I hope it will. The goal is small, entirely within my hands, and repeatable on a completely ordinary Tuesday.
The trick, I have found, is to reverse-engineer it.
Start from the outcome you actually want. Work backwards until you find the specific, controllable actions that reliably produce something in that direction. Then, and this is the part most of us skip, let go of the outcome and hold on to the actions. Grip the goal. Release the aspiration.
Once you do that, something genuinely shifts. You stop making blind guesses about whether you are “on track,” because you can simply check whether you did the work today. You stop moping over things you were never steering in the first place, the algorithm, the market, other people’s decisions, the timing of doors opening. And you get to celebrate small wins on a completely unremarkable Tuesday, because the goal was met even if the aspiration is still somewhere out ahead of you, taking its time.
This matters enormously for someone like me, who has spent this whole series admitting that I can do everything right and still not get the outcome. That lesson nearly broke me once, in the hardest season I am still walking through. Separating aspiration from goal is, in some ways, the practical version of that same hard-won wisdom. It does not remove the ache of wanting an outcome that has not arrived. It simply stops you from confusing that ache with failure.
The Diff’rent Strokes song says everybody has got a way to shine. I would add that everybody also has their own pace of shining.
Your goals are the strokes: the specific, repeatable, entirely yours actions you take, day after ordinary day. The aspiration is the world you are slowly building with them, the shape that only becomes visible much later, once enough strokes have accumulated to form a picture.
You cannot rush the picture. You can only keep making strokes.
So going forward, here is my new rule, and I offer it to you as freely as everything else in this series: aspirations on the wall, goals on the calendar.
Look at the wall when you need to remember why you are doing any of this. Look at the calendar when you need to know what to actually do today.
Try it. It might work for you too.
Come back tomorrow for Day 8: honoring the body that carried me here.
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Leave me a birthday note, tell me which post was your favourite, or share your own way to shine. I read every one.
