Why Business Goals Work for Some Creative Founders and Destroy Others
Ivy Malik . 6 min read (1740 words)
If goal setting produces stress and paralysis instead of momentum — the problem isn't your discipline. It's the type of goal you're using.
Not all business goals are created equal. Some goals pull you forward. They make decisions easier. They give you a clear filter for what to say yes to and what to walk away from. When things get difficult — and they always do — they remind you why you’re doing this.
Other goals sit on your desk like a weight. They produce a low-level anxiety that follows you into every week. They make you feel behind even when you’re moving. They turn progress into inadequacy because the destination keeps receding.
Here’s what I’ve observed after working with creative founders across every personality type and working style, the problem almost never comes from not knowing how to set goals. It comes from using the wrong kind of goal for how you actually work.
And most goal-setting advice — the SMART frameworks, the quarterly reviews, the vision boards — assumes everyone has the same relationship with goals. They don’t. And applying a system that works for someone else’s psychology to yours is one of the most reliable ways to feel like you’re failing when you’re actually just using the wrong tool.
The Four Ways Creative Founders Relate to Goals
There is no single right way to set goals. There is only the way that works for how your brain actually operates. Here’s how to identify which type you are.
Type One — The Crasher
You need goals you can blow straight through. Not because you’re easily satisfied — but because momentum is everything for you. The feeling of crossing something off, completing something, moving to the next thing — that’s what keeps you going.
When goals feel too big or too far away, you disengage. Not from laziness, but because your brain needs the reward of completion to stay activated. If this is you, the advice to “set big audacious goals” is actively bad for your productivity. You need a series of closer targets — things you can hit consistently — that collectively move you toward something larger. The satisfaction of reaching each one is the fuel for the next.
Your goal architecture:
short, stackable, achievable. Set a goal you can reach this month, not this year. When you reach it, set the next one. The big picture emerges from the momentum rather than driving it.
Type Two — The Overwhelmed
Goals don’t motivate you, they freeze you. The moment you commit to a specific target, your brain starts calculating everything that could go wrong, everything you’d have to do, everything that stands between here and there. The bigger the goal, the more paralysing the calculation. What should be a direction becomes a source of dread.
This isn’t a confidence problem. It’s a cognitive style. Your brain processes possibility as risk rather than opportunity — which means the traditional goal-setting model is working directly against how you think.
If this is you, you don’t need a destination. You need a direction, a general sense of where you’re moving and why — without the specific target that triggers the spiral.
Your goal architecture:
intention over target. Instead of “I will sign five new clients at £5,000 by June” — “I’m building toward a client base that feels energising and pays well.” The intention guides decisions without creating the measurement anxiety that shuts you down.
Type Three — The Stretcher
You need a goal that’s just beyond reach. Not comfortably achievable — that bores you. Not wildly unrealistic — that disconnects you. The precise tension between where you are and where you could plausibly be with real effort. That gap is what activates you. Close enough to feel possible. Far enough to require you to grow.
If this is you, the key is calibration. Too easy and you coast. Too hard and you catastrophise. The goal needs to sit in a specific zone — challenging enough to require a different version of you to achieve it, realistic enough that you can build a genuine path toward it.
Your goal architecture:
The stretch target. Set a goal that makes you think “I could do that if I really focused and made the right moves.” Then work backwards from it. Not a fantasy, bu planned reach.
Type Four — The Visionary
You need an unrealistic goal precisely because it’s unrealistic. Not to hit it — to use it as a compass. The north star that sets the direction even when you know you might never arrive. What matters isn’t reaching the destination. It’s what the destination makes you do today. What decisions it clarifies. What opportunities it makes obvious. What you stop doing because it doesn’t point toward where you said you’re going.
If this is you, you understand intuitively that the goal is a tool not a promise. You’re not setting yourself up to fail. You’re setting yourself up to move — in a direction that’s bigger than what the practical evidence currently supports.
Your goal architecture: the north star. Set the unrealistic version of what you want. Let it orient your decisions without measuring yourself against it daily. The question isn’t “am I on track” — it’s “is this decision moving me toward or away from what I said I wanted.”
The Goal That Works for Me — And Might Work for You
I’ll be honest. I’m not a natural goal setter.
Traditional goals — the specific, measurable, time-bound kind — don’t inspire me. When a goal becomes a number I have to hit by a date, something switches off rather than on. The goal stops feeling like mine and starts feeling like a test I might fail.
What works for me is a goal that aligns my action without demanding I meet it.
Not a target, but more like a filter. When I’m deciding whether to do something — take a client, create a piece of content, invest in something new — the question I ask is whether this decision moves me toward what I said I wanted.
Not whether I’m on track for the number. Whether the action is aligned with the direction. That’s enough. It produces clarity without anxiety. It makes decisions easier without making progress feel like a performance.
If goals have never worked the way you’ve been told they should — it might be that you’re a filter person. Not undisciplined. Just wired differently.
The Real Problem With Most Business Goals
Here’s what I’ve noticed underneath almost every creative founder who struggles with goal setting.
The goals aren’t theirs.
They’re borrowed.
From what revenue level sounds impressive. From what other coaches say you should be making. From what the market defines as success. From what they think they should want rather than what they actually want when they’re honest with themselves.
Borrowed goals produce one of three things. Overwhelm — because the goal doesn’t fit how you actually work. Stress — because you’re measuring yourself against someone else’s definition of success. Or paralysis — because somewhere underneath it you know the destination isn’t really yours.
The goal that motivates — whatever form it takes — is always the one that was built around the actual life you’re trying to fund. Not the number that sounds right. The specific outcome that would make an ordinary Tuesday feel like what you imagined when you chose this.
That’s the goal worth setting. And the first step toward it is knowing which type of goal-setter you actually are.
Finding the Goal That Works for You
A few questions worth sitting with honestly.
When you’ve felt most motivated in your business — what was driving it? A specific target, a general direction, a feeling you were moving toward, or the momentum of consecutive small wins?
When you’ve felt most stuck — was it because you had no goal, the wrong goal, or a goal that belonged to someone else?
What does the life you’re building actually need to look like — not the revenue number, but the ordinary week? What would it feel like to have the business working the way you imagined when you started?
The answers to those questions will tell you more about which goals to set than any framework will.
And once you know the goal that’s genuinely yours — the one that aligns your action rather than measuring your performance — everything built around it becomes easier. Not because the work is less. Because the direction is clear.
That clarity is one of the first things we establish inside Flight Club. Not the goal you walked in with — the real one. The one built around the life you’re actually trying to fund.
If that conversation feels like the one you’ve been waiting to have — DM me or visit ivymalik.com.
Ivy Malik is a business coach for creative founders with 19+ years of entrepreneurial experience and an MA(H) in Psychology. She is the author of Kill the Pitch and the founder of Flight Club — a 16-week coaching programme for designers, consultants and creative professionals who are ready to become someone the right clients can’t not choose.
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