Hi Reader,

No earbuds. I never ran with them. Some mornings the coaches would blast music through their gigantic portable speakers for the young athletes, and I borrowed their soundtrack. Most mornings it was just breath and footfall.

I ran in the rain. I ran in the Texas heat. Stephanie had the boys. Two or three miles, every time. Never more.

I wasn’t chasing distance. I was chasing splits. That’s how a reserve component Soldier in his early 40s ends up outrunning troops a decade younger on the PT test.

But somewhere in the middle of one of those laps, a question caught up with me.

Why have I never once wanted to run a marathon?

Not couldn’t. Didn’t want to. Twenty-two-plus years in uniform. Never failed a fitness test. Zero interest in 26.2 miles.

For about five seconds, that felt like a flaw. Every serious runner is supposed to want the marathon, right? It’s the box you check to prove you’re the real thing.

Then the feeling passed because I realized something. I was never training for a race. I was training to be a certain kind of leader. Nobody forces a reserve Soldier to exercise at 0600. Leadership demands discipline. Discipline builds habits. Habits build the person who shows up ready.

The marathon was never my goal. It was somebody else’s goal wearing my shoes.

Halfway there

We’re about halfway through the year. I’m about halfway through Chris Bailey’s book, Intentional: How to Finish What You Start.

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t have a procrastination problem. You set a goal, you work the plan, you accomplish it, you check the box. That’s the profile.

Bailey would ask a harder question: whose box are you checking?

He breaks goals into types, outcome goals and process goals among them, and walks through a surprising amount of research on how goal-setting actually works. Fascinating stuff, at least to me.

The SMART problem

Here’s the part that might sting a little.

Bailey points to research suggesting that SMART goals, the framework your last three commanders and every corporate training deck swore by, can actually be counterproductive.

Two of my previous advisory firms championed SMART goals. It’s catchy. It’s memorable. It caught on with the public. According to the research Bailey surveys, it just doesn’t hold up the way we assumed.

Why not? I’m not going to give you the answer here. Consider it motivation to put down the phone you’re reading this on and order the book.

But sit with the bigger idea: a goal is not wise just because it is measurable. Measurable goals are easy to inherit. Wise goals have to be chosen.

What you're avoiding is telling you something

My favorite chapter so far is on aversion, the reason we put off the things we know we should do.

Bailey’s recommendation is almost embarrassingly simple: ask why. Why don’t you want to do the thing you need to do? The dishes after Thanksgiving dinner. The long training run. The estate documents sitting in a folder.

Then break it into tiny steps. Gamify it. Match the approach to your personality and your values.

The avoided task is not a character defect. It’s a signal. The question worth ten minutes of your Saturday is this: what exactly am I avoiding, and why?

How you're wired

Values run underneath all of it. Bailey shows that certain values recur across human cultures, and your particular mix shapes the goals you set, whether you know it or not.

His own example: he’s not competitive at all, but he deeply values autonomy. He trained for a marathon, then stopped, because the training had already given him what he wanted. He felt prepared to run a marathon. That was enough.

Others would ask, why didn’t you just run the race?

Wrong question. He wasn’t in the race. He was in the training.

I’m wired the opposite way and landed in the same place. Competitive enough to chase the fastest time on the track, zero pull toward the marathon. Different wiring, same lesson.

Now look at your money

Here’s where this gets expensive.

Military life hands you a lot of pre-set goals. Default TSP settings someone selected for you. A retirement date driven by a milestone, not a plan. An SBP election window that arrives whether you’ve thought it through or not.

You can be disciplined about all of it and still be running somebody else’s race:

• A TSP allocation you haven’t revisited since it was set by default

• A transition timeline built around the DD-214, not around what comes after it

• An SBP decision made under time pressure instead of examined against your family’s actual needs

• Taxes handled year to year instead of planned across your retirement arc

• VA benefits sitting uncoordinated with the rest of your income picture

• Estate documents that exist but no longer match your life

• Retirement income treated as a pile of accounts instead of a designed paycheck

Each one of those can look like a checked box. Mission complete. Next task.

But checking boxes is not the same as building a coordinated plan, and this is exactly how Post-Service Financial Drift starts. Not through laziness. Through discipline pointed at inherited defaults.

The autopilot is comfortable precisely because you’re good at executing. That’s what makes it dangerous.

Operational Wealth Stewardship is the opposite posture. It asks the aversion question and the values question before it asks the execution question. What are we avoiding? What actually matters to this family? Then, and only then: what’s the plan?

A 10-minute exercise (pun intended)

No gear required. One page, ten minutes:

1. Name one goal you keep avoiding. Financial or otherwise.
2. Label it: outcome goal, process goal, identity goal, or inherited goal. Be honest about that last category.
3. Write the aversion in one sentence. “I don’t want to do this because...”
4. Write the value underneath it. What does this goal protect or serve?
5. Choose the next tiny action. Not the whole marathon. The first lap. Small enough that you could do it today.

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If the goal survives that exercise, it’s probably yours. If it doesn’t, you just got ten minutes closer to running the right race.

How are you wired? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.

Free Guide
Your TSP Has a Default. It Was Never a Plan.

A short guide for military leaders who want to make more deliberate decisions with their TSP before, during, or after transition.

Educational only. Not individualized financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Exponential Advisors LLC is an investment adviser registered with the Texas State Securities Board.

Respectfully,

Joshua Brooks, CFP®

Founder, Exponential Advisors LLC

<p>Exponential Advisors LLC is an investment adviser registered with the Texas State Securities Board. Registration with any securities authority does not imply a certain level of skill or training.</p>