A founder of Bolt Health, a men's-health startup launched in June 2025, struggles with the hard tasks required to scale. The advice: stop trying to control outcomes. Instead, commit to daily high-quality actions. If you won't do the work, let go of the goal.
When I think about setting goals, I think of two things. Number one, I want a process-oriented goal, not an outcome-oriented goal. If I say I want to grow my following on Twitter, right, I can't actually control how many people follow me on Twitter. What I can control is how do I show up and post every single day with my best work? But if I do that 365 times, if I build a process where I show up every day and post my best work, the outcome of growing my audience is inevitable. So number one, how do I make a goal inevitable? From process. And then two, how do I build the process so that the life that I live in service of that process is such a great life that the outcome doesn't actually matter?
Right?
And so I enjoy the process of writing. It helps me force clarity of thought. And so will I have lived a great life this year if, if I write every single day? The answer is yes. So the outcome actually doesn't matter, right? So how can I create a goal that makes the outcome both inevitable and simultaneously irrelevant?
That's my single favorite thing that you say, by the way. You often describe it as like it's two opposing thoughts that you can hold at once. You're making the outcome inevitable, but you also care less about the outcome. How would you counsel me on this? I'm all about the process, but there are some very specific outcomes that I want to hold myself accountable to in this year. I'll be very specific and vulnerable. I started a business in June of 2025 called Bolt Health. It's a men's health business. It's off to a good start. It's going well. The opportunity is unlimited. And I tell my friends, and it sounds like a clever line, but it's the truth. The biggest risk and limitation for the business is me and specifically my willingness to do the things that I don't want to do. I have no problem doing the things I enjoy, the writing and the evangelism and I, I'm passionate, it's aligned, but there's also building involves doing hard things and I have to consistently do the hard things that I don't want to do to achieve the outcome I want. So what's your reaction to that?
Yeah, I actually think the center of where self-sabotage comes from, and, and I think it comes from dissonance, right? Problem is most of us are totally fine to live in dissonance. We say we want to make $1 million, but we're not willing to do the brass tacks of what it actually takes to make— to make the million dollars. So what I would say is, how do you collapse the dissonance? Get really clear on what you want. Then ask yourself, like, do I want this outcome bad enough to do the things I don't want to do? If no, that's totally fine. You got to let go of the outcome. The dissonance comes in pretending that you can get the outcome without the input.
