For the better part of my working life, I have been taught to create “challenging goals.” I’ve learned well. I’ve applied that idea so often that it has become part of my routines, and I mindlessly begin every new effort by first crystalizing a view of the end. It has become one of the bedrock principles that I teach sales professionals and leaders in the training I do for them.

And, while I continue to believe in the usefulness of motivating goals for worldly success, I have, in recent years, begun to observe some negative effects on my spiritual walk