Scraping the rubber sole of my left sneaker with a jagged piece of plastic I found in the kitchen junk drawer, I realize I’ve been at this for 17 minutes. I killed a spider earlier-a big, hairy thing that looked like it had far too many legs-and the smear it left on the white rubber is haunting me. It’s a distraction, I know. But it’s a better distraction than the spreadsheet glowing on my second monitor, the one where the “Target” column has been highlighted in a shade of red that feels less like a warning and more like a wound.

We were in the conference room last week, 7 of us huddled around a mahogany table that costs more than my first car. The air was thick with the smell of expensive coffee and that weird, sterile scent of dry-erase markers. Dave, our VP of Sales, stood up and drew a line on the board that defied the laws of gravity. “We’re aiming for 157% of last year’s target,” he said, his voice brimming with a performative enthusiasm that made my teeth ache. “It’s a stretch goal. It’s meant to challenge us.” I looked around the room. Everyone was nodding. Not the kind of nod you give when you agree with a plan, but the rhythmic, self-preserving bob of people who have learned that dissent is a career-limiting move. We all knew it was a fiction. A beautiful, high-gloss lie that would be used as a blunt instrument against us in exactly 12 months.

I’ve spent 27 years in various versions of this room, and the narrative never changes. The “Stretch Goal” has become the ultimate management loophole. It’s the perfect crime. By setting a target that is mathematically improbable, if not physically impossible, the company creates a win-win scenario for itself and a lose-lose for the people doing the actual work. If by some miracle-some 77-hour-work-week, caffeine-fueled miracle-you actually hit the number, the company reaps massive rewards and sets the new baseline even higher for the next quarter. But the more likely outcome is that you fall short. You hit 117% of last year’s numbers-an objective success by any reasonable standard-but because you missed the 157% “stretch,” you are technically a failure. Your bonus is withheld, your performance review is “needs improvement,” and the company saves millions in variable compensation while still benefiting from your over-performance.

The Physical World vs. The Spreadsheet

I think about Max S.K. sometimes. Max is a pediatric phlebotomist I met at a clinic 7 years ago. His job is to draw blood from terrified toddlers, a task that requires a level of precision and empathy that most corporate executives couldn’t fathom if their lives depended on it. Max doesn’t have “stretch goals.” He can’t tell a screaming three-year-old that he needs to draw 157% more blood today because the clinic wants to optimize its laboratory throughput. In Max’s world, you either get the vein or you don’t. If he misses, the consequences are immediate: a bruised arm, a traumatized child, and a very angry parent. There is a reality to his work that is grounded in the physical world. He told me once, while he was expertly navigating a needle into my own son’s tiny arm, that he handles exactly 47 patients a day. No more, no less. Because at patient 48, his hands start to shake, and he refuses to let his exhaustion become someone else’s pain.

We’ve lost that in the white-collar world. We’ve replaced the physical limits of human capability with the infinite scalability of a spreadsheet. We assume that because digital numbers can grow forever, human effort can too. But it can’t. When you ask a team to hit an impossible target with the same 7 resources they had last year, you aren’t motivating them. You are institutionalizing a culture of failure. You are teaching them that their best will never be enough, which is the quickest way to turn a high-performer into a cynic. I’ve felt it myself. You start to look at the goals and you just… stop caring. You do the math and realize that even if you work yourself to the point of a nervous breakdown, you’ll still only be at 137%. So why bother? You might as well aim for 97% and get some sleep.

This is where the corporate world could learn a thing or two from the people who actually build things. I was looking at a project from

Sola Spaces the other day, and it struck me how different their reality is. In construction, physics is the ultimate manager. You can’t set a “stretch goal” for the structural integrity of a glass beam. If the math says a piece of tempered glass can withstand a certain amount of pressure, you don’t ask it to withstand 157% more just because it’s Q4. If you do, the whole thing shatters. There is an honesty in materials that we lack in our quarterly planning sessions. A sunroom is a sanctuary, a place where light and structure meet in a very specific, calculated balance. It requires an understanding of limits-the limit of the load, the limit of the glass, the limit of the site.

In our world, we pretend those limits don’t exist. We treat people like they’re made of something more durable than glass and steel, but we’re not. We’re more like the spider I crushed. We’re fragile, and when the pressure becomes too great, we leave a messy smear on the floorboards of the organization. I remember a project 17 months ago where we were told to cut our turnaround time by 37%. We did it, but at what cost? Two people quit, one ended up in marriage counseling, and the quality of the work was so shoddy that we spent the next 7 months fixing the errors we made in the first 3. But on the executive dashboard, that 37% reduction was a green checkmark. It was a success. The human wreckage didn’t show up in the data.

The Illusion of Vision

Why do we keep doing this? I think it’s because we’ve become addicted to the idea of the “hustle.” We’ve romanticized the grind to the point where we view reasonable, achievable goals as a sign of weakness. If you aren’t aiming for the moon, you’re just taking up space. But the moon is 238,857 miles away, and most of us are just trying to get through the day without a migraine. There’s a profound lack of trust at the heart of the stretch goal. Management doesn’t trust that employees will work hard if they aren’t being chased by an impossible number. It’s a carrot-and-stick approach where the carrot is actually a hologram and the stick is the only thing that’s real.

I’ve made mistakes in my time, too. I remember once, early in my career, I was the one setting the targets. I thought I was being a visionary. I told my team of 7 that we were going to revolutionize the way we processed claims. I set a goal that was so far out of reach it was laughable. I thought it would inspire them. Instead, I watched as the light went out in their eyes. They didn’t work harder; they just worked more performatively. They spent more time talking about how hard they were working than actually doing the work. I had created a theater of productivity, and I was the only one in the audience who didn’t know it was a play.

The Integrity of 100%

I wonder what would happen if we just stopped. If, the next time Dave stands up and draws a vertical line on the whiteboard, one of us just said, “No.” What if we insisted on goals that were grounded in the same reality as a

Sola Spaces installation? What if we acknowledged that our resources are finite, that our time is precious, and that 100% is actually a perfectly fine number to hit? 100% means you did exactly what you said you were going to do. It means you were honest about your capacity and you delivered on your promise. In any other context, that would be called integrity. In the corporate world, it’s called a lack of ambition.

Max S.K. gets it. He doesn’t need a stretch goal to do his job well. He does his job well because he cares about the kid in the chair. He does it well because he takes pride in his craft. That internal drive is 17 times more powerful than any arbitrary number a manager could dream up. But that drive is also fragile. It can be extinguished by the constant pressure of unattainable expectations. I’m still scraping my shoe. The spider is mostly gone now, just a faint grey shadow on the rubber. It’s funny how a small thing like that can occupy your mind for 27 minutes. Or maybe it’s not funny. Maybe it’s just a symptom of a mind that is trying to find something, anything, that makes sense in a world that has traded reality for a “stretch.”

I think about that spider. It was just going about its business, probably looking for a place to build something 7 inches wide, and I ended it because it was in the way of my walk to the fridge. Corporate goals are like that sneaker. They come down on you from above, indifferent to your complexity, driven by a force you can’t argue with. But eventually, the person wearing the shoe has to stop and clean off the mess. Eventually, the cost of the crushing becomes too high to ignore.

The Only Goal That Matters

Is it possible to have an honest conversation about what we can actually achieve? Or are we destined to keep nodding at whiteboards until we all just burn out and fade away? I don’t have the answer. I just have a clean shoe and a monitor that is still glowing red. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be 157%. Maybe the goal should just be to stay human in a system that would prefer we were algorithms. After 37 years of life and 17 years of work, that feels like the only stretch goal worth hitting.