Why a Tuesday, Not a Target

How a vision for a life differs from a vision for a company

Most men in this room have written a vision statement before. It probably had a number in it, a date, and the word “leading.” This morning you were asked to write something different: one ordinary day, five years from now, in the present tense. This page explains why. It sets the boardroom vision next to the Tuesday page, shows where each piece of the morning came from, and points you to what to read if one of them calls to you. You do not need any of it to write §2.2. Read it after you have written your page, or on the evening the page will not come.

The Morning in One Table

Every part of the Tuesday page has a reason. Here they are in the order the page uses them.

1The Vision You Have Written Before

The strategic-planning tradition · Carter McNamara, Field Guide to Nonprofit Strategic Planning · and a thousand corporate retreats

The planning textbooks draw a line that is worth keeping. A mission says why an organization exists, and it can stay the same for decades. A vision says where it is going. That much came straight into Session 12: mission is present tense, vision is future tense, and that is why §2.1 comes before §2.2.

Then the textbooks add a rule that does not fit a life. A good vision, they say, is SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Their standard example is a trucking company that will be “one of the top three transporters of goods and people in North America by 2010.” For a company, that works. Everyone can see whether it was met, and a company exists to reach targets.

A man is not a company, and a target behaves differently inside a life. The economist Charles Goodhart noticed it about government statistics, and the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern put it in the form most people now quote:

Write “I will see my grandchildren twice a month” and you will soon be counting visits rather than paying attention at the table. Write “I will lose twenty pounds by June” and you have a scale, not a body you care for. The number crowds out the thing it was meant to measure.

Arthur Brooks gives a second reason. In From Strength to Strength (chapter 3, “Kick Your Success Addiction”) he describes strivers who reach each goal and feel the satisfaction fade within days, so the next goal has to be bigger. He sums it up as a fraction: satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want. A vision written as a list of targets keeps increasing what you want. A vision written as a day you would gladly live again tends to reduce it.

2Why a Day

Annie Dillard (b. 1945) · The Writing Life (1989) · Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024) · the Day Reconstruction Method (2004)

Annie Dillard put the whole argument in one sentence:

A “life” is too large to picture, and a man who tries to write one ends up writing a résumé. A day is small enough to see: the coffee, the walk, the lunch, the conversation at four o’clock, the light going off. If you see the day clearly, you have seen the life.

The research points the same way. In 2004 Daniel Kahneman and four colleagues published the Day Reconstruction Method in Science. They did not ask 909 working women in Texas how satisfied they were with life. They had each one rebuild the previous day episode by episode, and say how each episode felt and who she was with. Time with friends and close relationships came out near the top. The commute came out at the bottom. Kahneman went on to describe two selves, the one that lives each moment and the one that tells the story afterward. A target speaks to the storyteller. A day speaks to the man who has to live it.

3Why the Present Tense

Laura A. King · University of Missouri · “The Health Benefits of Writing About Life Goals,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2001)

King asked students to write for twenty minutes on four days in a row. One group wrote about their “best possible self”: a future in which everything had gone as well as it reasonably could. Compared with a control group, they reported more positive mood afterward, and over the following months they visited the campus health center less often. Later studies, including work by Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky in 2006, found similar lifts in mood and optimism.

The writing does more than record a hope. When a man describes a good future as though it were already happening, he starts to notice the pieces of it that are within reach. That is why the page says “I wake,” not “I would like to wake.”

4Why Five Years

Laura Carstensen · founding director, Stanford Center on Longevity · A Long Bright Future (2009) · TEDxWomen talk “Older People Are Happier” (2011)

Carstensen’s theory of socioemotional selectivity says that when people sense their time is limited, they change what they pursue. They care less about collecting new contacts and information and more about the people and experiences that matter most to them right now. Her studies found that older adults, on average, report steadier and more positive emotions than younger ones. She calls this the positivity effect.

Five years fits that shift. It is close enough that you can see actual faces: the grandson who will be engaged, the friend who will still be there. It is far enough that real change can happen: a body rebuilt, a friendship deepened, a younger man mentored to his feet. Twenty years out you would be writing science fiction. Next month you would be writing a calendar.

5Why “Already Living”

Dallas Willard (1935–2013) · Renovation of the Heart (2002) · George Eldon Ladd · The Presence of the Future (1974)

You met Willard in Session 4. His pattern for any real change is VIM: Vision, Intention, Means. You see it, you choose it, and then you build it. Session 12 is the seeing week. Session 13 is choosing and building.

The question your triad asked, “Which part of this are you already living?”, comes from an older source. The New Testament speaks of the Kingdom of God as both arrived and still coming, and George Ladd’s phrase for it is “already and not yet.” Jesus says the Kingdom is “in your midst” (Luke 17:21) and also teaches his followers to pray “your kingdom come.” A Christian vision works the same way. It is not a far-off country you will reach after enough effort. It is a place you are already visiting on good days.

6What a Good Day Is Made Of

Kerry Burnight · gerontologist, UC Irvine School of Medicine · Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life’s Second Half (2025)

Burnight spent decades in clinical gerontology and became tired of a field that measured only lifespan and healthspan. She proposed a third measure, joyspan: how long a person keeps living with well-being and satisfaction. She grouped what she saw in thriving older adults under four practices: Grow, Connect, Adapt, Give.

Those are the four verbs Session 1 promised would come back, and here they are. Burnight treats Connect as the center of the other three, which matches what Kahneman found. Her Adapt is not giving up. It means naming what has been lost, grieving it honestly, and turning toward life as it is now. That is the Five Losses work from Session 3, seen from the other side.

7What Is Not on the Page

Arthur C. Brooks · From Strength to Strength (2022), chapter 4, “Start Chipping Away,” and chapter 6, “Cultivate Your Aspen Grove”

Brooks opens chapter 4 with the story often told about Michelangelo. Asked how he carved the David, he is said to have answered that he simply removed everything that was not David. Whether or not Michelangelo said it, the point stands. Past a certain age a good life is made more by subtraction than by addition. Brooks argues that the second half goes better when a man stops collecting and starts chipping away.

Chapter 6 is about the aspen grove. A grove that looks like a forest of separate trees is often one organism, joined by a single root system under the ground. Brooks uses it as a picture of the friendships a man neglected while he climbed the first mountain, and still needs.

What No Target Can Do

A target can tell you whether you got there. It cannot tell you who you were with when you did, or whether you were really present for it. The Tuesday page is built to show exactly that. That is why it has names on it instead of numbers, and why your wife is the right person to read it.

None of this makes the vision soft. A Tuesday page is harder to write than a goal, because you cannot hide behind a number. Session 13 will ask the practical question, “What has to be true for this day to happen?”, and turn the parts you underlined into a Rule of Life. The day comes first, and the plan grows out of it.

One Old Tool That Still Works

McNamara gives one drill that is worth bringing to your page. When refining a mission, he says, add or delete one word and notice how the scope changes. Try it on your Tuesday with sentences instead of words. Cross out one sentence and read the page again. If the day hardly changes, the sentence was decoration. If the day falls apart, you have found what your life is built around. Then ask whether that sentence is in your §2.1 mission.

If You Read Only One

Going Further

Tags: Vision · Tuesday in 2031 · Particularity · Present Tense · Already and Not Yet · Joyspan · Grow Connect Adapt Give · Brooks · Carstensen · Dillard · Willard · Session 12