Goals vs. Movement

To build on top of last week’s article, where I unpacked some of the biggest initiatives on Nexubis’ roadmap for 2025, I want to flip the lens inward for a moment. Less company, more founder. This time the focus is on the biggest lesson 2025 handed me as a human being, not just a CEO.

There is that classic line: "Aim for the moon, land among the stars."

‍For me that translates to aiming stupidly high, knowing that even if you miss, you still end up way further than if you just shot for the curb. But in the same breath, here is the twist that hit me this year: failing to meet your goals does not automatically mean you failed. At least, not in the way you think. Let me explain.

Last week I read a newsletter from Ran Segall, founder of Flux Academy, that landed perfectly on this idea. He basically looked back at the goals he wrote a decade ago and realised that, on paper, he "failed" most of them. The SaaS did not hit the magical revenue number, the consulting offer morphed into something else, the conference speaking did not play out the way he imagined, even the house situation changed for reasons completely outside his control. If you scored it like a school test, it would look like a mess.
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Yet his actual life is full, meaningful, successful on a level his younger self could not have even written down as a bullet point.

The key insight was simple: it was not the goals themselves that mattered, it was the act of moving toward them.

‍Taking action on those original targets opened doors he could not see at the time, and those doors led somewhere great, even if it was not where the original map said he was supposed to end up.

For me it was much the same. A while ago I pulled out the goals I wrote down in 2023, and then again at the end of 2024 for this year. Some of those goals are now completely irrelevant. Some did get "achieved", but almost accidentally, as a byproduct of other priorities that were never written down. The goals that were still theoretically relevant but did not get ticked off, were not ignored because I got lazy, they just got pushed aside because more important, more urgent things showed up and demanded attention.

That is the thing about goals. We write them as if our environment will politely stay the same for 12 months while we execute. No big macro shifts, no surprise opportunities, no random fires to put out. Just a clean to-do list that stretches across a calendar. Reality does not care about your neatly formatted roadmap. Life is shifting sand. Every week, every month, hell, every day brings new moving parts that change what "important" looks like.

A great example is the 1 year company roadmap I compiled at the end of 2024. Looking back at it now, it was completely off. The most important foundations did get built, sure, but some of the biggest wins of 2025 were things I did not even have language for when I wrote that document. New clients, new products, internal changes, partnerships, curveballs. None of that was on the original page. Same with my original "business plan". If I compare that first version to what Nexubis actually is 2 years later, they barely look related, and that is a good thing.

So here is where I landed: things rarely play out the way you foresee, but they usually play out the way they need to. The point of setting goals is not to perfectly predict your future, it is to give your future something to work with. You move toward the moon, and along the way life throws you a completely different galaxy.

Moral of the story: it is good to have a north star. Just do not stare at it so hard that you miss what is right in front of your feet.