Two goals posts in, this is where year two starts

In January I wasn’t the one holding the pen. Elizabeth wrote "Setting goals we’ll actually be held to," the Journal’s first post, five commitments with a deadline attached. In October it was my turn: an honest scorecard against that list, three hit clean, one short of the number, one missed outright. Now it’s December, and the pattern holds. Every year we publish what we’re building toward next, and every year the previous list gets graded before the new one goes up.

This is the third post in that thread. The first two are worth the read: the original five commitments, and the accounting of how they landed. What follows assumes you’ve seen at least the second one, because two of the five goals below aren’t new. They’re unfinished business from 2023, written down again on purpose.

What we’re building toward in 2024

01. Grow the collective to twelve, and name the roles in advance. We started year one with a founding circle and closed it with two additions, a web developer in February and a motion designer in June. In 2024 we’re growing to twelve people total, and this time we’re naming the seats before we fill them instead of hiring reactively when the workload finally forces the issue: a second motion and film hire, and our first dedicated brand strategist seat. Growth on purpose, not growth by whoever’s resume landed first.

02. Land three nonprofit partnerships, at full agency rates and full agency craft. Last year we said three, landed two, and told you exactly why: enterprise engagements ran long, and nonprofit hours got whatever was left over instead of a protected slot on the calendar. The number doesn’t change for 2024. The mechanism behind it does. See commitment five.

03. Build motion and film into a two-person practice, not a single seat carrying it alone. One hire in 2023 gave us the discipline. It didn’t give us the capacity to run a client’s motion timeline without leaning on freelance support for anything beyond a short cut. A second hire in 2024 changes that math, and motion and film becomes a practice the haus can staff on its own instead of a service we quietly outsource around the edges.

04. Land at least one client engagement outside California. Still. This is the one we said out loud that we missed. We call ourselves a nationwide haus, and as of October, every client on the roster was a California company. That claim doesn’t get quietly revised down to fit reality. The goal gets tried again, unchanged: at least one client relationship built and run entirely outside California by the end of 2024.

05. Formalize a written, quarterly capacity-planning review. The nonprofit shortfall in 2023 wasn’t a values problem. It was a scheduling one. Community hours got scoped around whatever enterprise work was already on the books, instead of the other way around. In 2024, nonprofit and community capacity gets blocked on the calendar first, every quarter, in writing, before a new enterprise engagement gets scoped against those same hours. This is the fix behind commitment two, not a separate wish.

“It turns out that this ‘study’ is merely an ‘urban myth’… revealed that no such study had ever been done.”

Gail Matthews, Department of Psychology, Dominican University of California

The two misses don’t get buried

Here’s what’s easy to do with a goals post in year two: quietly swap the goal you missed for a fresh one that sounds similarly ambitious, and hope nobody checks the math. We’re not doing that. The out-of-state client goal is the same commitment from January 2023, restated because it’s still true and still unmet. The nonprofit number is the same three, not scaled down to two so we can call it a win in advance.

What changed isn’t the target. It’s the honesty about why we missed it. Enterprise timelines that ran long weren’t a surprise, they were a planning failure we didn’t see coming until the calendar was already full. A written quarterly review is a small, unglamorous fix for that, the kind of thing that never makes a highlight reel. But a goal missed twice for the same unaddressed reason isn’t a stretch goal anymore. It’s a habit. We’d rather fix the habit than raise the target and hope this time is different.

Why we still publish the version with edges

There’s a famous statistic that circulates in business circles: a Harvard or Yale study supposedly found that the small percentage of graduates with specific written goals ended up earning ten times more than everyone else, decades later. Researcher Gail Matthews went looking for the original study behind that number and couldn’t find it, because it doesn’t exist. Reviews of the research literature, along with investigative reporting from Fast Company, confirmed the "study" was never conducted at all. It’s a number people repeat because it sounds convincing, not because anyone checked it.

We cited Matthews’ actual research, the study that does exist, in our first goals post back in January. We’re pointing to it again here, not the myth, because the difference between the two is the whole argument of this post. A number nobody verified is a nice story. A number you can check against a dated public record is a commitment.

“A goal we carry forward from a missed year is worth more to me than a new one we’re sure to hit. The safe list is the one where every line item was already halfway done before we wrote it down.”

David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV

What happens if we miss, again

Same answer as last year, because the answer doesn’t change just because the stakes feel a little higher the second time around. We’ll come back to this post next October or next December, whichever the cadence calls for, and we’ll grade every line against what actually happened. If we miss the out-of-state goal a second year running, we’ll say so plainly and figure out what the real obstacle is, instead of quietly retiring the commitment and hoping the pattern goes unnoticed. Two years of an honest miss is more useful to us, and to you, than one year of a vague win.

Come back to this one too. We will.