I like unreasonable goals. Not ambitious, not stretch, unreasonable. The kind where the team’s first reaction is to check whether you’ve misunderstood the problem. I’ve seen the expression: polite attention shifting to barely concealed concern. I understand it. It looks like recklessness. But there’s a logic to it.
We tend to think of goals as instruments of performance. They exist to make people work harder, measure progress, allocate rewards and blame. But when building products, goals are instruments of perception. They determine what you can see and how you see it. Telescopes didn’t create galaxies. They revealed that our model of the universe was wrong.
A reasonable goal preserves your existing perception of the problem. An unreasonable goal destabilizes it and destabilization is the point. You don’t want the probability of achieving a goal to be 95%, 90%, or even 80%. You want it to be lower, because unreasonable goals have three wonderful benefits: they force prioritization, they reveal that risk and reward aren’t linear, and they create clear signals in a world of noise.
What Moves the Needle
Say your goal is to grow revenue by 5%, your existing product remains valid. You adjust knobs and improve experiences, job done. If your goal is to grow revenue by 10×, most of those knobs stop working. The current mental models become inadequate they break, and you and your teams are forced to confront assumptions you previously treated as laws of nature.
The 10x goal doesn’t demand more effort. It demands you invalidate your current mode of thinking.
Reasonable goals leave you with too many options. Imagine your business makes $100 today and your goal is $101 tomorrow. There are thousands of plausible paths forward. None are obviously wrong, which means none are obviously right. You drown in optionality, teams spin their wheels.
Now change the target to $10,000 tomorrow. Most options disappear instantly. They are not just insufficient; they are irrelevant. You are forced to consider actions that previously felt irresponsible, naive, or socially unacceptable.
The unreasonable goal forces focus on the biggest drivers of value, functioning less like a target and more like a filter, deleting most ideas and leaving only the handful that might matter.
Risk to Reward
Risk and reward aren’t linear. Is it better to have a 95% chance of making $5 or a 50% chance of $500? It’s the latter.
You can spend a week adding a login button animation that improves retention by 0.5%, or you can rebuild the onboarding flow in a way that might fail completely but could double activation. The expected value of the risky bet is usually higher, whereas safe goals feel responsible but more often they’re just irrelevant. This is why when you feel like you’re likely to hit a goal it’s good to pause and ask is this doing enough?
The Second Prize is Clarity
Failing to achieve an ambitious goal is never as good as achieving it. But the second prize is pretty neat too, even when you fail, you vastly increase how much and how rapidly you learn, making the next big swing much easier to land. Unreasonable goals compress time, extracting truth faster than polite goals ever could, cutting through noise, extracting clear signals about what to do or not do next.
It’s Not You, It’s Us
If your culture treats missed goals as verdicts on competence, setting impossible targets is just cruelty with extra steps. People burn out chasing mirages. They game metrics. They lie about progress because the truth feels like career suicide. The approach only works when failure is treated as information, not judgment. It’s harder and more important to shift culture than pick a big number.
This style of goal may not be for everyone all the time, but I’m convinced that the worst goals aren’t the ones you miss. They’re the ones you hit without having to change. Reasonable goals preserve today’s truth. Unreasonable goals create new ones.