On the dreams you never could have imagined.

One of the things I love most about the work I do is helping people set goals. Not corporate-deck goals. Not five-year-plan goals. The actual goals that move a life from where it is to where the person wants it to be next.

In recovery, the goals on that list at fourteen months sober look very different from the goals on the same list at fourteen years sober. The shape of the list changes. That change is the subject of this essay.

The goals when the goals are about getting your life back

Early-recovery goals look different from how people who haven’t been through this expect them to look. They look like:

• Getting a car.
• Getting your credit score above 600.
• Living on a balanced budget, with the rent paid on the same day every month and a couple hundred left over at the end of it.
• Holding a job past day 90.
• Holding a job past day 365.
• Buying clothes that are new, in your size, for an interview you actually got called back for.
• Going to bed at the same time most nights, by choice, because you decided this is how the week works.
• Reading a book all the way through without losing track of what was happening in chapter three.

The goals of getting your life back are very specific, and very mundane, and you do not write them on a vision board and you do not post them on Instagram and you do not announce them at networking events.

And they matter so much.

The first car after the lost years is not just a car. It is mobility. It is the ability to take a job that’s not on the bus line, to drive your kid to a doctor’s appointment without asking your mom for a ride, to put gas in the tank because you decided to. The 600 credit score is not just a number. It is the difference between an apartment lease your name can actually be on and one that requires a co-signer who is tired of co-signing. The balanced budget is not just a budget. It is the absence of that specific 3 a.m. feeling of not knowing what bills are coming when.

Those are the dreams when the dreams are reasonable. They are not small. Anyone who calls them small has not been the person who needed them.

What happens if recovery holds

You get the car. You build the credit score. You hold the budget for a year and then for two. You get past day 90 of the new job and then past day 365 and then past the day where the job stopped feeling new at all.

You stop noticing how impressive your own quiet life has become, because everyone else around you has had a quiet life their whole adult life and the comparative scale you were on a few years ago has become the scale they live on without thinking about it. Their friends had cars. Their friends paid rent on time. Their friends went to bed at the same time most nights. They did not know they were doing something hard, because for them it wasn’t. For a while it stops being hard for you, too.

And you start to set new goals.

The new goals are not about getting life back. The new goals are dreams you could not have imagined wanting a few years ago.

What the new goals look like

A trip with your kids to a place you saved up for and decided was worth it. A career you grew into by doing the next right thing for a few thousand consecutive working days. Time with friends who don’t know your story and who are friends anyway. A purpose larger than your own survival that you get to spend your daylight hours on.

A house you bought because you wanted to live in it, not because you needed shelter. A car you bought because you wanted to drive it, not because you needed to get places. A wedding you went to as a guest because you were invited as part of the actual community of the people getting married, and they wanted you there because of who you have become, not in spite of who you used to be.

A version of your work where you mentor someone newer than you, and they trust you with something they have not told anyone else, and you carry it well because the work you did on yourself ten years ago taught you how to.

A version of your family life where the kids are old enough to know you have been steady their entire lives, and that the steady you they know is the actual you, not a version of you you were performing.

These are not bigger goals. They are different goals.

You could not have set them in early recovery. You did not have the wingspan for them. You would have looked at the list and felt the gap between where you were and where this list was, and you would have decided the list was for someone else.

The car was for you. The credit score was for you. The balanced budget was for you. The fact that you cannot see how the car becomes the trip with the kids — the way the credit score becomes the house — the way the balanced budget becomes the gift you give a stranger fifteen years from now — is one of the honest features of early recovery. You are not supposed to see it yet.

The bridge between the two lists

The bridge between “goals about getting life back” and “goals you never could have imagined” is the gratitude framework you build in the doing of the first list.

That framework is the subject of its sibling essay. The short version: when you have to fight for the basics, you build a daily relationship with what is actually true about your life right now. That relationship is the muscle that lets you, later, actually enjoy the bigger goals when they arrive. Without it, you arrive at the bigger goals and find that they’re also somehow not quite the right size, and the next ones up are the ones that would have been the right size, and you have built nothing.

With it, you arrive at the bigger goals and find that they were worth the path. Not because they are objectively better than someone else’s bigger goals. Because you can be in them. Because you can be there with yourself.

How to think about goals in early recovery

If you are in early recovery and the goals on your list are the basics, that list is not too small. It is the right list.

Do the work it takes to check those goals off. Pay attention to what it takes to check them off. The discipline you build in checking off “rent paid on time, every month, for a year” is the same discipline that will check off “a house you own outright” eventually. The goal scales; the discipline is the discipline.

The book’s Chapter 10 is built around this question. The WOOP Goal Builder in the platform is the tool for translating any of these goals — the get-the-car ones and the take-the-kids-on-the-trip ones — into actual implementation intentions. WOOP comes from researchers Gabriele Oettingen and Peter Gollwitzer; the move that makes it different from other goal-setting frameworks is that it requires you to name the obstacles before you make the plan. You want what you want with your eyes open. The framework works for the bus-pass goal and it works for the purchase-the-house goal because, structurally, the work of getting to either one is the same shape: figure out what you want, figure out what the actual outcome is, figure out what gets in the way, and figure out what you’ll do when it gets in the way.

The reps build the discipline. The discipline scales the goals. The goals you can’t imagine yet are the ones that arrive on the back of the reps.

One last thing.

If you are reading this in early recovery and your goal list right now is “don’t use today and get to a meeting,” that is not too small a list either. That is the foundation goal underneath all the other foundation goals. You do not need to scale your goals before you are ready. The goals you are ready for are the goals on your list right now. Trust that.

And trust that the moment the bigger dreams have somewhere safe to land, they will come up. You will not have to manufacture them. They will arrive — quiet, specific, recognizable — the day you are ready to set them down on a page.

When they do, the framework you built when your goals were the basics will be the framework that lets you actually enjoy them when they happen.