GDD: Goal Driven Development

Goals have had a major influence in my life over the last couple of years, and I want to share how I think they've helped me grow and develop—hence the name—personally.

I think we all wish to be some better version of ourselves or achieve greater things than we already have, but most of us never really take a step towards achieving those wishes.

In my opinion, the first step is setting a goal. A proper, realistic goal gives you a target, helps you visualise what working towards it and achieving it could look like, makes planning easier, and makes talking about your dreams easier.

Working towards my goals has helped me get better in terms of health and relationships, but achieving them has had a greater effect on me: a confidence boost that made me believe I'm more capable than ever of achieving whatever I set out to do.

This side effect, which I did not consider in the beginning, is the main benefit I've enjoyed from setting goals—and why I think goals matter.

For that matter and for the sake of this post, I've allowed myself to use yet another "Driven Development"-suffixed term to talk about goals.

The Importance of Setting Goals

If you've already established some goal, it means it must mean something to you.
Achieving them matters to you because you feel it could bring you one step closer to a future version of yourself. Or simply because you like the challenge, which in and of itself means growth of some kind.

When working towards things that matter to you, it becomes easier to change your life around. You change your daily routine to fit them in. You adopt new habits or learn new things in order to get to the end destination. You prioritise certain activities over others.

Goals help you effectively change your life for the time it takes to achieve them.

But in order to feel like you're really working towards a goal, it really helps if it first meets certain criteria. That's why it's important to properly set goals.

The Importance of Properly Setting Goals

You can probably think of a time when you set a goal that was too vague or too unrealistic. It's the kind of goal many set as a New Year's resolution because they feel the need to improve, but don't really mean to.

They're pretty easy to spot because they're lazy. These sound like:

• I will lose fat
• I will get bigger
• I will get a new job
• I will meditate more

All of them sound like hopes you tell to your friends in a bar conversation. They sound like things you hope to achieve, but you're not sure you'll make it.

This is where goal-setting frameworks jump in. There's plenty of literature out there about the lot of them (OKRs, SMART, etc.), but all focus on making goals clear, achievable, and measurable—which increases the likelihood of success.

SMART Goals: How I Set Them

This framework's name is an acronym for the characteristics a goal should have:

• Specific: It should be focused on what you want to achieve.
• Measurable: You should be able to count whatever you're doing to track progress.
• Achievable: It should be realistic. You don't want to set yourself up for failure.
• Relevant: It must be important to you—otherwise, why would you bother?
• Time-bound: If there's no deadline, you risk dragging it on forever. It also reminds me of Parkinson's Law.

For example, instead of saying "I want to get more muscle," I started saying "I will put on 5kg of muscle in six months from now."

Goals I Have Achieved

I'll share a couple of goals I set out to achieve, explain why I thought they were good goals, and how I've benefited from working on them.

Goal: "Put on 5kg of muscle in six months from now"

This was one of my 2024 resolutions, and I was motivated to do it for two reasons: first, I wanted to feel more comfortable with my body. Secondly, I thought this was a very SMART goal.

My thinking was: I'd been training for a couple of years without seeing much improvement in my condition or physical look. I'd also recently learned that building muscle was a good way to accelerate metabolism. On top of that, it seemed like something I could really achieve, which would boost my ego by beating yet another challenge.

So I got measured at 75kg and 15% body fat and set out to be 80kg by summer 2024.

As a side note, I had set a secondary goal to get to 80kg at 10% body fat. I thought from the beginning it was unrealistic—and eventually I failed at it—but it helped me to work harder by having a more ambitious goal.

In order to get there I did the following:

• Adjusted my routine to include more strength and muscle development training.
• Started training every day of the week and went trail running on Sundays (great activity to do with my little Podenca).
• Got in touch with a nutritionist who helped me with a diet tailored to my body, training routine, and goals.
• Started prioritising sleep.

The results of simply working on the goal were visible very soon. In just a couple of months I was already at 80kg (though at a higher body fat percentage), but other benefits started to appear: I had better physical condition, I could lift more weights, I looked better (and was often reminded of it by people), and generally I was feeling better.

I did not get back to 15% body fat or under before the deadline, so I did not achieve that goal. I analysed what happened, and I think it was because I didn’t change my life as much as I needed to: I was still drinking one beer too many (to my nutritionist's despair) and became a little lenient on my diet during holidays and early summer (with its parties n' stuff).

Still, I had improved a lot physically and I had adapted quite well to the new lifestyle, so I decided to keep those new habits and eventually reached (and surpassed) that goal. My latest measurements said I was 83kg and 14% body fat. I look and feel better than ever and, approaching my 30s, I think (and say probably too often) that I am in my prime.

Goal: Read one book a month

Yet another goal of 2024 that I set because I felt I needed to improve in another area of my life.

I really like reading, but never allocated enough time for it, and I had a list of books to read that had been piling up. I decided it was time to prioritise that activity in my life, so I challenged myself to read 12 books in 2024.

The goal itself was pretty SMART in my opinion. I thought it was achievable even for an occasional reader like myself, and tracking progress would be quite straightforward.

I compiled a list of books I had been meaning to read for at least 3 to 4 months and began reading. A full list of books I read that year can be found in my Goodreads.

As the year passed and I focused on books I found a little dense or complicated, I eventually found myself not achieving the goal. But I was pretty happy to get to 9 books out of 12, and got a nice balance between interesting and captivating novels (which I'd read very quickly in comparison) and educational content that taught me things I highly value now.

In retrospect, I did not achieve my goal because I loaded the year with many educational books that took me much longer than expected to finish. Had I prioritised easier reads, like novels, I would have probably achieved and maybe even surpassed my goal.

Another take is that maybe I read too slowly or get too distracted with certain types of books, so there's also room for improvement on that front.

Regardless, working to achieve this goal proved to be very beneficial for me.

How Goals Motivate Me Today

For me, goals serve as a progress tracking mechanism for my development—be it personal, health-related, or professional.

It's how I define where I want to be in different areas of my life and the changes I need to make to achieve them—or at least get close.

They motivate me to say no to other things because I am in the middle of a challenge with myself. Other things can wait while I'm at it, and some of them may not ever come back if where I end up feels much better than where I was before (which is usually the case).

Ultimately, it's another way to keep me focused and to show myself once again that consistent work and a plan (and maybe a little luck) is the key to achieving anything in life.

Conclusion

Looking back, I don’t think it’s the goals themselves that changed me—it’s who I became in the process of chasing them.

Setting SMART goals gave me direction, structure, and something to measure progress against, but more importantly, they helped me build trust in myself.

That’s the real win. Not just lifting more, reading more, or looking better—but knowing that when I say I’ll do something, I probably will. And that confidence? It spills into everything else.

So if there’s something you’ve been wanting to change or achieve, start by turning it into a proper goal. One that’s clear, realistic, and meaningful to you.

The sooner you start moving, the sooner you’ll realise that you’re capable of way more than you thought.

Driving your own personal development through goals is, for me, another way of living an asymmetric life.

P.S.

While goals give direction, don't forget to enjoy the journey itself. Progress happens in the day-to-day — in the small wins, the new habits, the moments you show up when you didn’t feel like it.

The path was the goal, and it felt glorious!

Try to feel that along the way, not just when you hit the target.