The Hairy Goal - On why the decade belongs to the untamed, not the optimised

There is a tool I keep returning to. It comes from the world of leadership coaching, which means most people who encounter it treat it as a planning exercise.

Fill in the boxes.

Set the milestones.

Choose your celebrations.

I want to argue it is something older and stranger than that.

The tool is called the PHAG, the Personal Hairy Audacious Goal. A decade-level commitment. Ten annual milestones. A celebration attached to each one. The format is almost insultingly simple. A grid. Some boxes. Your name on it.

But I keep snagging on the word hairy.

Not ambitious. Not bold. Not even audacious alone, that word we’ve learned to domesticate, to put on mission statements and VC decks until it means nothing.

Hairy.

As in: not yet groomed.

As in: something that grew from a place you didn’t fully plan.

As in: wild.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard distinguished between two kinds of commitment. The first is the commitment you make once the rational case is assembled, once the risk is calculated, the path is visible, the outcome is defensible. This kind of commitment isn’t really commitment at all. It’s compliance with evidence.

The second kind is the leap. The movement you make before the ground appears underfoot. Not recklessly, Kierkegaard was not advocating chaos, but with the recognition that certain thresholds cannot be crossed by reasoning alone. They require you to go first, and let the path reveal itself in the going.

A PHAG, properly understood, is a leap with a decade attached to it.

This is why the word matters. Hairy things haven’t been made presentable yet. They haven’t been stress-tested by the internal critic who needs everything to look viable before committing. The hairy goal is the one you’re not quite sure you can achieve, the one that makes you slightly uneasy when you say it out loud, the one that, if you’re honest, frightens you a little.

That fear is not a warning sign. It is a signal of contact with something real.

The depth psychologist Bill Plotkin writes about what he calls the work of the soul, the long, often subterranean process by which a person moves from a constructed identity (the self we built to survive) toward something more native, more genuinely their own. This work, he insists, is not linear. It does not follow a project plan. It moves through descents, disorientation, and return. It takes years. Sometimes decades.

The mythologist Michael Meade puts it differently but arrives at the same territory: a life shaped only by external expectations, career ladders, social approval, the logic of productivity, is a life that has missed its own story. What interrupts that drift, what cracks the performative shell, is almost always some encounter with what you actually want at depth, the desire that doesn’t fit the approved categories.

This is what a real PHAG is pointing at. Not a stretched version of your current ambitions. Not a bigger number on the same trajectory. Something genuinely other, a direction that emerged from a level of self-knowledge most planning frameworks don’t have the patience to reach.

The ten annual milestones are where the architecture gets interesting.

Think about what they actually are. Each milestone is not just a checkpoint. It is a year of your life in which something must die and something must be born. You arrive at year three of a decade-level commitment not as the same person who set the goal in year one. You are someone who has been changed by the first two years of trying, failing, adjusting, learning, and continuing anyway.

This is what Krippendorff calls second-order change, not adjusting the strategy but being altered by the process of pursuing it. The goal doesn’t just describe what you want to achieve. Over a decade, it shapes who you become.

The celebrations are not incidental to this. They are a structural acknowledgment that arrival matters, that the movement toward something difficult deserves to be witnessed, including by yourself. Too many people are so focused on the next phase that they skip this. They arrive, note it, and move on. The celebration is the full stop. It is the moment you stand in what you have done before stepping into what is next.

Without them, the decade becomes a grind. With them, it becomes a rhythm.

I want to be direct about something.

Most goal-setting frameworks are designed to help you execute on what you already want. They take desire as given and focus on the mechanics of delivery. There is nothing wrong with this, but it misses a prior question:

Where did this desire come from? Is it really mine, or is it borrowed from the ambient culture I’ve been swimming in?

The hairy goal forces this question because it insists on ten years. A decade is long enough that you cannot fake it. Short-term motivation, external validation, performance for an imagined audience, these don’t sustain over a decade. What sustains is something more stubbornly internal.

A genuine why that doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else.

This is also why the PHAG lives in the register of the personal, not the professional. Yes, professional integration will lead to outcomes, this is a likely be involvement. But the animating core is the person, not the role. It is my goal in a way that a company target or a KPI never can be.

There is something that happens when a person’s deepest wanting finds its echo in the work they are asked to do. Not alignment in the corporate sense, not the language of strategy cascades and objective-setting, but something older and stranger. The moment when what you are burning toward and what the world needs from you are, briefly, the same fire.

This is worth a longer conversation. What I can say here is that there may be a shape to it, a rhythm of approach and departure, personal and collective, the decade of the individual and the decade of the institution, moving together like two frequencies that occasionally, remarkably, produce the same note. What gets made in those moments is different from what gets made in their absence.

Different projects.

Different organisations.

Different lives.

So here is the practical question I want to leave you with.

Not: what are your goals?

But: what do you want that you have not yet let yourself fully want, because it seems too large, too strange, too risky, or too vulnerable to say out loud?

Start there. That is where the PHAG lives.

Hans Schulte writes on the long work of becoming. This post is part of an ongoing series drawn from The Long Fire, a book about descent, return, and what it costs to stay true to something.

The Decade’s Work

Before the path, the longing.

Before the longing,

the silence where the real thing lives not yet named, not yet tame,

still wearing its original fur.

A decade is not a plan.

It is a country you agree to cross before you know the terrain,

before the language comes,

before the body learns what the soul already knew when it said yes in the dark.

Each year a door.

Each door a small dying.

Each dying, a room you didn’t know was there

lit from inside by whatever you refused to abandon.

This is the work.

Not the milestones

those are just the places you stopped

to remember who you were becoming.

The work is the long fire.

The one that doesn’t ask permission.

The one that was burning before you decided to call it a goal.

Go toward it.

The boxes will fill themselves.