Connor BeatonFound of ManTalks | Empowering Men to Build Better Lives, Relationships, and Minds

The Anti-Goal Is the Real Goal

6 May 2025 · 1 min

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A short excerpt from a May 6, 2025 YouTube conversation titled "The Anti-Goal Is the Real Goal" (Connor Beaton). The speakers discuss the idea of "anti-goals"—explicit boundaries or things one refuses to sacrifice—illustrated with a personal example: one speaker aims to impact 100 million lives in five years but sets an anti-goal of not missing time coaching his son’s sports teams, and suggests timing hustle phases around children’s development rather than when they are very young.

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Can you maybe just give an example of what that might look like if somebody had a goal of promotion or starting a company? Can you just give some examples of what an anti goal.
Might sound like or look like? I'll give you one from my own life. Like I say, my goal is I want to impact 100 million lives over the next five years across everything that I do. Books, any of the writing, all the stuff. Big ambitious goal. My anti goal might be not being able to coach my son's sports teams. I want to achieve this goal of reaching 100 million people, but not if it means that I have to travel so much and be gone so much that I no longer have the relationship or the time to coach my son's sports teams. I'm never going to have this time back. So maybe the call to action is that we, this whole model that we have of like hustle and growth and chase, maybe the time to really lean in and hustle is when your kids are in their teenage years or going to college, when they're not as interested in you as they are when they're five years old.