I have carried one goal with me for most of my adult life: To visit more than 100 countries.
When I first imagined doing it, the number seemed almost ridiculous. I was a young New Zealander living about as geographically far from much of the world as it is possible to be, international travel was considerably more expensive and complicated than it is today, and I had no master plan explaining how I was somehow going to find the time and money to explore more than half a planet.
Yet the goal remained.
As the years passed, something interesting happened. Reaching 100 countries stopped being simply a distant number I hoped to achieve and gradually began influencing other decisions I made about work, money, where I lived and, perhaps most importantly, how I used my time. I didn’t organize my entire life around reaching a country count, but having that distant objective continually pulled me toward experiences I might otherwise have postponed or missed altogether.
That, I have come to believe, is what separates a genuinely meaningful long-term goal from another item on a bucket list.
A meaningful goal doesn't just change where you end up. It changes the decisions you make along the way.
Long before I had heard the term Big Hairy Audacious Goal, the first seed of my own log-term goal came from something as ordinary as a board game.
As a teenager, I played a Pan American World Jet Flight game that involved travelling around the globe, and although it was only cardboard, cards and imaginary flights, it introduced me to names and places far beyond the small part of the world I knew. I started reading more about distant countries and became increasingly fascinated not simply by famous landmarks, but by the idea that billions of people were living completely different versions of everyday life. Travel gradually stopped looking like something other people did and began looking like something I wanted my own life to contain.
My first overseas trips in my early twenties were relatively modest adventures to Australia and Japan with friends, with plenty of partying mixed in with whatever cultural enlightenment we imagined we were acquiring. Yet those early journeys did something important: they transformed distant places from pictures and names into somewhere I could actually go.
From there, the idea became progressively bigger. I didn’t just want an occasional overseas holiday. I wanted to see an enormous amount of the world for myself, and somewhere along the way that vague ambition acquired a number – More than 100 countries.
I had no spreadsheet explaining how I would get there and no timetable showing which country I would visit in which year. The goal was specific enough to provide direction, but loose enough to leave almost everything else open, which turned out to matter.
After working and saving for several years, I eventually bought a one-way ticket and left New Zealand for my first serious overseas adventure, beginning in North America before continuing to Europe. In those pre-internet days, leaving home felt considerably more final than boarding an aircraft does today. Communication with family and friends meant expensive telephone calls and letters that took weeks to arrive, while much of what lay ahead would have to be figured out as I went. There was apprehension in leaving, but also an extraordinary sense that the world had suddenly become much larger.
Eventually I reached London, where my friend Garry helped me secure an IT role in banking. That opened a career path I could never have predicted when I first left New Zealand and ultimately created opportunities to work elsewhere in the world, but something else was happening alongside my career.
Every decision about work now had another consideration sitting quietly beside it.
What would this allow me to experience?
Money was obviously important, particularly because travel required plenty of it. But maximizing income was never the only calculation. A contract wasn’t simply something that produced a salary; it could buy months of freedom afterwards. Living overseas wasn’t merely a career decision; it placed entirely different parts of the world within reach. Time between jobs wasn’t necessarily unemployment that needed to be minimized; Sometimes it was exactly the time I had been working to create.
The 100-country goal was beginning to influence decisions long before I was anywhere close to achieving it.
This is where large goals become interesting. Their value isn’t confined to some distant day when you can finally put a tick beside them. Once a goal matters enough, it begins affecting what you say yes to, what you are willing to sacrifice, what you spend money on and which opportunities you notice.
In other words, the goal begins shaping the route.
That became particularly clear after I moved to Tokyo, where I would eventually spend around nine years working in demanding IT roles within investment banking.
Author working in Tokyo, Japan
The financial opportunity was excellent, but the working culture could be intense, and I realised fairly early that I didn’t want my years in Japan to become an endless sequence of contracts in which I earned increasingly good money but continually postponed the reason I wanted the money for in the first place.
So I created a rule for myself : For roughly every period I spent working, I would give myself a similar period away from work to travel.
It wasn’t always mathematically precise, and circumstances inevitably interfered, but the principle became important. I would work hard during a contract, save aggressively and then step away for an extended period rather than immediately searching for the next opportunity to earn more.
From a conventional career perspective, that wasn’t necessarily the optimum strategy. I could have earned considerably more money by moving directly from one contract to another, and there were certainly people around me doing exactly that. But they were optimizing for something different.
I wasn’t trying to maximise lifetime income. I was trying to create a life in which earning money and having the freedom to use it while I was still young and healthy enough to explore the world could coexist.
That personal rule eventually gave me long stretches of time across Europe, Asia, South America, the Caribbean and elsewhere, while my career continued in between. Work funded travel, travel gave purpose to much of the work, and neither needed to consume the whole of my life.
Looking back, this may have been one of the most consequential effects of having such a large goal. The ambition to visit more than 100 countries didn’t simply encourage me to book more flights; it changed the relationship I developed with work itself.
There is an obvious danger in setting a goal such as visiting 100 countries: the number can become more important than the experience.
Travel can easily turn into another form of collecting, where countries become trophies and success is measured by how many borders have been crossed rather than whether anything meaningful happened after crossing them. If all I wanted was to increase the total as quickly as possible, I could have designed my travels very differently.
But some of the experiences I value most came precisely because there was rarely much urgency to get to the next country.
Over the years I have trekked toward Everest Base Camp, slept on mud floors while travelling through Burma, somehow ended up playing in a nationally televised cricket match in Rajasthan, and jumped from trains in Vietnam simply because a town outside the window looked interesting enough to explore. I spent long periods travelling through parts of Eastern Europe that received relatively few foreign visitors and discovered repeatedly that the places I knew least about before arriving were often among those that taught me the most.
None of these experiences mattered because they increased a counter from 71 to 72 or 84 to 85. The number had done its job simply by keeping me moving.
That is an important distinction when thinking about any enormous goal. The finish line may provide direction, but the real return should be accumulating long before you reach it. If the only value of a twenty-year ambition arrives on the final day, you have created an extraordinarily long wait for a very short reward.
A worthwhile goal should make the journey itself valuable.
The term Big Hairy Audacious Goal, (BHAG), was developed by Jim Collins in his study on visionary companies, and became widely known through his book titled Built to Last. His original idea was: A compelling, ambitious long-term objective could focus effort and give people something concrete to pursue beyond incremental improvement.
But there is an interesting question when the same idea is taken out of the corporate boardroom and applied to an individual life. What happens when you choose one objective sufficiently large that achieving it may take years, perhaps even decades?
Most conventional goals are designed to be completed relatively quickly. We want to lose weight, earn a qualification, save a deposit, run a marathon, change jobs or reach some other identifiable milestone, and there is nothing wrong with any of those ambitions. They give us something useful to work toward.
A BHAG operates differently because its scale means it can sit in the background while large parts of life happen around it. You don’t wake every morning thinking about it, yet when significant decisions appear, the goal can provide another way of evaluating them. That is why I don’t think a personal BHAG needs to be something that scares you, despite the language often used around ambitious goals. Nor does it need to sound impressive when you tell somebody about it. It just needs to matter enough to you that it changes something.
There is an irony in telling everybody they should have an enormous, audacious ambition. The moment we do that, having a BHAG risks becoming another rule people feel obliged to follow.
Someone decides they should build a multimillion-dollar company because entrepreneurship is admired, run an ultramarathon because difficult physical challenges receive attention, visit every country because somebody else did, or pursue an enormous career objective because ambitious people are supposedly meant to think big. But a borrowed ambition is still borrowed.
The entire value of a personal BHAG comes from its ability to organize decisions around something you genuinely care about, which means the first question shouldn’t be “Is my goal big enough?” but “Whose goal is this?”
If nobody could see the achievement, would you still want it? If there were no social-media post at the end, no congratulations, no impressive story to tell and nobody keeping score, would the years spent pursuing it still feel worthwhile?
Those questions matter because a large goal has a large opportunity cost. Every serious ambition consumes some combination of time, money, energy and alternatives, which means choosing one direction inevitably means giving something else up.
My own travel decisions certainly cost me financially. The months I spent travelling were months I wasn’t earning very good money in banking, and over decades that undoubtedly added up to a significant amount.
I don’t regret the trade because I knew what I was trading for. Someone else might have valued financial security, career progression or building greater wealth more highly, and chosen to keep working instead. Neither decision is inherently better; what matters is whether the trade reflects what you genuinely want from your own life.
A meaningful goal is not defined by how impressive it looks to other people, but by whether what you give up to pursue it still feels worth what you gain.
A Big Hairy Audacious Goal can influence years of your life, so being ambitious isn’t enough. Before committing yourself to one, test whether the goal deserves the time, energy and opportunities you may give up pursuing it.
Would you still want this goal if nobody else ever knew you achieved it?
Remove the recognition, status, social-media posts and approval of other people. If the achievement suddenly feels less important without an audience, ask yourself whether you genuinely want the outcome or simply want what achieving it says about you.
Does this goal influence what you do today, or does it exist only somewhere in the future?
A meaningful BHAG should eventually affect real decisions about your time, money, priorities or behaviour. If nothing about the way you live needs to change in order to pursue it, you may have an interesting ambition, but it probably isn’t yet functioning as a life-shaping goal.
Would pursuing this goal still add value to your life if you never completely achieved it?
A goal that takes ten or twenty years is a poor bargain if all of its value exists at the finish line. Consider what pursuing it will allow you to experience, learn, create or become along the way. The journey should produce a return long before the final result arrives.
What will you have to give up, and is the goal worth that price to you?
Every serious goal has an opportunity cost. It may consume money, time, career opportunities, relationships, freedom or other experiences you could have chosen instead. Don’t ask only how badly you want the goal. Ask whether what you are prepared to sacrifice for it still makes sense.
If this goal stops reflecting who you are, will you give yourself permission to change it?
A goal should provide direction, not become a prison. The person who chose it ten or twenty years ago should not have permanent authority over the person you become. Persistence matters when the goal still matters; continuing simply because you once committed to it is something very different.
The Result
If your goal survives all five questions, you probably have something more meaningful than an impressive ambition. You have a goal that reflects what you value, influences how you live, makes the journey worthwhile and remains yours by choice.
A good BHAG doesn’t tell you how impressive your life should become. It helps you decide what deserves a meaningful part of it.
The strange thing about carrying a goal for decades is that eventually the distant number begins to feel very close.
For much of my life, visiting more than 100 countries existed somewhere over the horizon. There was always another region to explore, another journey to organise and another part of the world I knew almost nothing about.
As that number has drawn closer, I’ve increasingly realised that reaching it will not be the most valuable part of the achievement.
There will undoubtedly be satisfaction in finally crossing the line, particularly because the goal has travelled with me for so much of my adult life, but the real return has already been collected over decades: The countries themselves, the people I met, the unexpected friendships, the difficult journeys, the ridiculous situations, the different cultures and the thousands of smaller decisions I made because seeing the world remained important enough not to postpone indefinitely.
That is ultimately what I think a Big Hairy Audacious Goal can do when it is chosen well.
It gives a distant ambition enough gravitational pull to influence the present.
The goal doesn’t need to involve travel, and it certainly doesn’t need to impress anybody else. It might involve creating something, mastering something, contributing something, experiencing something or changing something that matters deeply to you. What matters is that the objective is genuinely yours and significant enough that pursuing it begins changing the way you make decisions today.
Perhaps the best measure of an audacious goal, then, isn’t simply whether you eventually achieve it, but whether pursuing it helped you build a life you would have wanted even if you never reached the finish line.
NoRuleBook is built around the idea that a meaningful life should be consciously designed rather than assembled from expectations we rarely stop to question. A personal BHAG can become part of that process, not because everybody needs an enormous goal, but because the right long-term objective can force you to become clearer about what deserves your limited time.
If you want to examine more of the assumptions shaping your own decisions and start thinking more deliberately about the life you are building, click the NoRuleBook image below to get your copy.
-
-20%
NoRuleBook
Original price was: $9.95.$7.95Current price is: $7.95. -
-50%
No Rules Start-Up
Original price was: $19.95.$9.95Current price is: $9.95. -
-35%
NoRuleBook Bundle
Original price was: $22.90.$14.95Current price is: $14.95.
Submitted 1.0
Manual 5.0
