The Horizon Goal
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Instead of a defined destination, Dicks aims at a horizon — a wide, distant, deliberately fuzzy direction such as 'I want to do something in music' or 'I'm going to be a storyteller'. A horizon is an approximation of the dream: the path you take probably won't land you exactly where you imagined, but it lands you in the vicinity, and always in front of you rather than behind. Over-specifying the endpoint ('I will have a record contract and play arenas') narrows the routes you'll accept and makes almost every real outcome read as failure. Because the horizon is vague, the only sane next move is to take one possible step, and if it's wrong, take another. Those tiny steps compound: incrementalism, not a single leap, is what produces the enormous result.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Name a horizon, not a destination
Describe the dream at the widest useful level — 'something in music', 'appear on a screen for millions of people in an educational or inspiring way', 'be a storyteller'. It should be a direction you can walk toward for years without it running out.
Pro tip Phrase it so at least three different careers could satisfy it.
- 2
Delete the over-specified version
Explicitly reject the narrow form of the same dream — the record contract, the rock band, the arena. Dicks calls the belief that only one specific outcome will make you happy a terrible approach to life, because it rules out the DJ, producer or teacher versions of the same horizon.
Watch out If you can only name one acceptable outcome, you've written a destination, not a horizon.
- 3
Take one possible step today
Stop plotting the route and take a single step that plausibly points at the horizon — order the ukulele, buy the camera, post the video. Thinking about how to reach the goal counts for nothing; movement counts.
Pro tip The step can be as small as a purchase. A ukulele arriving at your house is real progress.
- 4
Stack easy wins to build momentum
Deliberately sequence trivially achievable steps: order the instrument, get the music book, learn one chord. Excitement leads to motivation, motivation leads to momentum. Dicks applies the same logic to weight loss — start on a day the scale already moved in your favour.
Pro tip Pick a first step that costs five minutes and cannot fail.
- 5
Let the path revise the horizon
Treat each step's result as information about where the horizon actually is. His wife wanted the guitar, found the ukulele easier and better suited to her kindergarten classroom, then discovered the instrument forgave her singing. The landing point was left of the original aim but still in the vicinity.
Watch out Landing somewhere unexpected is the system working, not the plan failing.
- 6
Bank on incrementalism over visible results
Accept that small daily inputs won't show measurable returns early. Dicks's balance example — standing on one foot while brushing your teeth — is invisible at thirty days and only compounds over years. Judge by whether you took the step, not by whether you can see the change.
Pro tip Baseline anything you plan to measure on day one, or you can't claim it didn't work.
Watch out Expecting immediate visible results is the main reason people abandon changes that were working.
In the wild
Ali Abdaal's horizon from 2008 was vague: do something musical on YouTube, like the cover artists he watched. Over four or five years he averaged about one video a year — filming on a phone, then buying a microphone, then a camera, then learning to edit, even blogging about his Premiere Pro process. None of it produced a music career. But when he decided to make videos about getting into medical school, he already owned a camera and a microphone and knew how to edit. The horizon shifted to educational content; the accumulated steps carried straight over.
→ Years of apparently unrelated small steps removed almost all the friction from the launch that actually worked.
Dicks's wife wanted to play the guitar. She quickly realised the ukulele was easier to play, smaller, and usable in her kindergarten classroom, so she switched. Later he asked whether she'd ever sing along with it; she said she wasn't a good enough singer. It turned out the ukulele is forgiving enough that you only need to sing well, not beautifully. She now plays and sings to her kindergarten students and has changed the way they learn — none of which was the original goal.
→ An abandoned guitar goal became a teaching tool that reshaped her classroom, reached by steps rather than planning.
Common mistakes
Defining the dream too specifically
Insisting on the record contract, the rock band or the arena means you'll only move in one direction and will reject every adjacent opportunity — producing, DJing, teaching — that would have satisfied the underlying want.
Planning instead of stepping
Dicks tells people that all the thinking they're doing about reaching their goal is meaningless and doesn't count for anything. Plotting the route feels like progress while producing none; a single concrete step outranks any amount of deliberation.
Quitting because you can't see progress
Incremental change is designed to be invisible day to day. Someone who tries a habit for a month, never baselined it, and concludes it isn't working has misunderstood the mechanism rather than tested it.
From the transcript
“I like a horizon goal because I think that you know if we're thinking about a dream or that thing on the horizon I think…”
“take a step forward even if that means going online and buying a ukulele that's the first step”
“the idea that tiny changes accumulated over time produce enormous results”
From the episode
Someday Is Today: Achieve Your Goals And Live Without Regret - Matthew Dicks
Matthew Dicks