Make Your Goal Your Slave (And Not The Other Way Around)

By Yaacov Weiss, LCSW

He walked into my office calmer than usual. For weeks, we had been working on the headaches that plagued him every time he sat down to learn. They weren’t medical headaches; they were stress headaches. At first, he thought it was the act of thinking in learning itself that was causing the pressure. But as we unpacked it together, the real story came out.

He wasn’t just thinking in learning. He was picturing himself giving a shiur to a packed room of Talmidei Chachamim, where every sevara had to be flawless. And when he learned with his chavrusa, he demanded of himself that every word be irrefutable. The weight of those expectations was crushing him, not the learning itself.

We began exposures to loosen the grip of perfectionism. Instead of imagining himself giving shiur to a room full of Talmidei Chachamim, I asked him to picture giving it to a room full of babies in baby carriages. It was almost comical, but it worked. Little by little, he practiced letting go of the need to be “Magid Shiur–ready” at all times. Slowly, the headaches began to ease.

But weeks back, when I had first suggested those exposures, he asked me something I’d deliberately set aside.

“Do you mean,” he said hesitantly, “that I have to give up my dream of becoming a Rosh Yeshiva?”

At the time, I redirected. But now that he had made progress, it was time to go there.

I told him something he wasn’t expecting: “I’m not such a big fan of goal-setting.”

He looked startled. In his mind, goals were everything. Without them, life felt empty. And yet, he was living proof of how destructive goals can become.

The problem with goals is that they’re elusive. By definition, you can’t fully control whether you’ll reach them. If you set a goal to make a million dollars this year, to publish a sefer, or to become a Rosh Yeshiva, the outcome isn’t in your hands. Too many factors lie beyond your control. And when your self-worth is tied to something you can’t control, stress and disappointment are almost guaranteed.

But having no direction isn’t good either. People without goals tend to drift, lacking focus and motivation. So what’s the balance?

I explained: a goal can either be your master or your slave.

If you live every day thinking, “If I don’t become a Rosh Yeshiva, my life is worthless,” then you’ve become enslaved to the goal. You’re not learning out of love of Torah or Avodas Hashem. You’re not enjoying what you’re doing. You’re learning out of fear, desperation, and pressure.

But if you use the goal as a tool — as motivation to get to seder on time, to push yourself for another half hour, to stay focused on your chavrusa instead of your phone — then the goal is serving you. Whether you ever achieve the title or not becomes almost beside the point. The dream elevates the present.

So I asked him directly: “Are you a slave to this dream, or is it your slave?”

Without hesitation, he said, “I’m its slave. Absolutely. If I don’t become a Rosh Yeshiva, then what's the point of all this?”

And there it was — the source of his stress. Every headache, every anxious spiral, every crushing wave of despair came back to this one belief: if he didn’t reach that lofty goal, then everything else was worthless.

I told him gently but firmly: “If your dream pushes you to give more effort and be more present in your learning, that’s beautiful. But if it’s crushing you with despair, then the dream itself has become the problem.”

He sat back in silence. On one hand, he loved the dream. It gave him direction, identity, purpose. On the other hand, he was beginning to see how much it enslaved him.

Finally, I reframed it for him: “You don’t have to give up the dream. Just bury it deep. Let it sit quietly in the background. Don’t measure yourself against it every day. Once a year, check in and ask if you’re still on track. But day to day, your avodah is much simpler: figure out how learn Torah because it’s Torah. Serve Hashem in the present moment and find meaning and enjoyment in that. Forget the goal. Ironically, if you do that, you’ll have a far better chance of actually becoming a Rosh Yeshiva than if you stress about it every day. Let the dream serve you, not the other way around.”

As the session ended, I could see that he was slowly getting it.

He was beginning to understand something profound: freedom doesn’t come by setting goals. It comes from maximizing the present moment. If goals can help you achieve that then great, otherwise it's better to let go of them.

*Some details may have been changed.