The alarm goes off at 5:30 AM. You’re up, caffeinated, and crossing items off your to-do list. You’ve hit the gym, meal-prepped for the week, responded to emails on your commute, hit your step count again, crushed your meetings, and hit up a networking event after work. It’s all in a day’s work. You’re crushing it, right?
There’s only one problem, you’re tired. You’ve checked all the boxes, hit all your goals, and on your way to more! But, you’re also completely depleted.
Welcome to hustle culture, where rest is a luxury and burnout is a badge of honor!
Hustle culture sold us a seductive lie: that if we just work harder, optimize more, and sacrifice enough, we’ll finally “make it.” But all it did was turn our lives into a performance review complete with metrics, like pounds lost, followers gained, words written, money earned. The thing is, we’re all human, not machines optimized to produce perfection.
Research shows that chronic stress from relentless goal-chasing leads to burnout, anxiety, and a disconnection from what actually matters. We’ve become so focused on the “goal” that we forget to live.
But what if there’s another way? Enter soft goals.
Soft goals are gentle, flexible objectives that prioritize your well-being and values over rigid outcomes, arbitrary timelines, and quick gains.Soft goals emphasize the journey rather than the destination.
Hard Goal: “Publish a 30 poem poetry collection by December 31st.”
Soft Goal: “Cultivate a consistent writing practice that is nourishing and authentic.”
Hard Goal: “Lose 15 pounds in 3 months.”
Soft Goal: “Develop a loving relationship with movement and food that honors my body.”
Hard Goal: “Post on Instagram daily and gain 1,000 followers this quarter.”
Soft Goal: “Share creative work that feels true to me, without the need of external validation.”
Hard Goal: “Achieve an unachievable goal I set for myself because I was told doing it all is what ‘success’ really means.”
Soft Goal: “Create a practice of self-compassion, sustainable growth, and adaptability to raise my quality of life.”
Values-Based: Goals rooted in what genuinely matters to you. Who you want to become, not what you are worth.
Process-Oriented: Focusing on the practice itself rather than the outcome.
Flexible: Routines and goals that bend without breaking and allow for life’s chaos.
Compassionate: Imperfection is accepted and expected as part of growth.
Intrinsically Motivated: You pursue soft goals because they bring you joy, meaning, or peace rather than to impress others.
The truth is: the grind mentality that promised us success is actually setting us up to fail.
Before you set any goals, get clear on what actually matters to you.
The magic is in the language.
Instead of: “Meditate for 20 minutes every morning”
Try: “Develop a morning ritual that helps me feel grounded”
Instead of: “Read 52 books this year”
Try: “Create space for reading as a form of rest and curiosity”
Instead of: “Build a six-figure business”
Try: “Build a creative practice that sustains me financially and spiritually”
Flexible guideposts keep you oriented without constraining you.
Track moments rather than metrics and at the end of each week, reflect.
Overwork is the new normal. Rest is something to do when the important things are done–but they are never done. Looking at different forms of rest, from sleep to vacation, Silicon Valley futurist and business consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang dispels the myth that the harder we work, the better the outcome.
He combines rigorous scientific research with a rich array of examples of writers, painters, and thinkers–from Darwin to Stephen King–to challenge our tendency to see work and relaxation as antithetical. “Deliberate rest,” as Pang calls it, is the true key to productivity, and will give us more energy, sharper ideas, and a better life. Updated with a new epilogue on rest and successful aging, Rest offers a road map to rediscovering the importance of rest in our lives, and a convincing argument that we need to relax more if we actually want to get more done.
The winner of the National Book Critics Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.
In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world-his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.
The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight
In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy” to spend time in quiet contemplation. But how can we reclaim our time?
In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.
This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time–inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales–that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it–the way we experience time itself–and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save” time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.
So set those soft goals. Embrace the journey. Honor your humanity. And remember: the gentlest path is often the most sustainable one. Share your journey with us @littleinfinitepoetry and inspire others to redefine hustle.