The Bigger Goal Nobody Stops to Set

A mother sat across from me and told me she wanted her five-year-old to have fun.

That was the whole goal. "I just want him to have fun." I'd asked the question we ask every parent on the first day (what do you want your kid to get out of this?), and fun was the answer. I wrote it down. We started him in class.

Here's what she didn't say, because she had never stopped long enough to put it into words. Her son was so shy he couldn't raise his hand in preschool. So shy that when another kid pulled a toy out of his hands, he just… let it go. Watched it walk across the room. He had been doing a quiet, careful version of getting walked on for most of his short life, and the plan on the table was "have fun."

Sit in that gap for a second.

Because it is the most expensive gap in business, and almost no one names it.

Why do customers decide on price instead of value?

Customers default to price when no one has defined a bigger goal for them to weigh it against. Price is the only number visible at the moment of decision, so it becomes the whole conversation. Renewals, cancellations, and purchases collapse onto cost, not because cost matters most, but because nobody drew the larger picture the price was supposed to buy. Define the goal first, and price stops being the only point on the board.

She wasn't being shallow. She was doing what every one of us does when someone asks what we really want and we haven't done the work of deciding. We reach for the smallest, safest answer in the drawer.

You've heard the business version. You've probably said it this quarter.

Each of those is "I just want him to have fun" wearing a tie.

Here is what it costs you. When no one defines the bigger goal, every decision in the building defaults to the only number everyone can already see: the price. People renew on price. Quit on price. Buy on price. Not because price is what they care about, but because price is the only point on the board, and a single point is all anyone can argue about.

Most people never stop to define the bigger goal. So they renew, or they quit, on price instead of on the line they're actually walking.

What is the past, present, future conversation?

The past, present, future conversation is a three-point method for helping someone see their own progress and decide to continue. You name exactly where they started, show concrete evidence of how far they have moved, then extend the line forward and let them describe the future out loud. Three points establish direction the way they do in physics: one is a dot, two is ambiguous, three reveal the arc. It works because people trust the reasons they generate themselves.

Before I taught a single kick, I was an aerospace engineer. I worked on the math that puts things where they need to be.

So let me give you the one idea from that job that has paid for itself in every business I've run since.

A rocket does not aim at where the target is. It aims at where the target will be. You burn fuel toward a point in space that is empty right now and won't be empty by the time you arrive. Aim at the present position of a moving thing and you miss it every single time.

That's selling. That's leadership. That's parenting. You are never deciding about where someone is. You are deciding about where they're going to be.

And the part that took me years to carry from the launch pad to the school is this: you cannot draw an arc from one point. One point is a dot. Two points is a line headed nowhere in particular. You need THREE points before you can see where something is actually going: where it started, where it is now, and where the curve is taking it.

Past. Present. Future.

Charles Dickens worked this out in 1843, gave the three points names, dressed them up as ghosts, and we've been calling it A Christmas Carol ever since. Same math. He just had better costumes.

Here's why the three points matter more than they should. We are wired to miss our own arc. In a 2013 study in Science the authors named the End of History Illusion, Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson found that people at every age admit they changed enormously over the last ten years, then swear with total confidence that they're basically done changing now. We chronically underestimate where we're headed. Gilbert put it plainly: human beings are "works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished."

Which means the customer staring at your invoice can't see their own future without help. Neither can the member with a finger on the cancel button, or the mother who wants "fun." Your job is to draw the three points they can't draw for themselves.

The three-point conversation

Three moves. In order. Out loud.

1. Past: name the exact starting point. Not "you've come so far." Specific. "On day one you couldn't do a single push-up." "When we started, you had four names in your pipeline." "He couldn't raise his hand in preschool." The detail is the whole thing. Vague pasts produce vague decisions.

2. Present: show the change, even one percent. Find the delta and make them look at it. Teresa Amabile's research for The Progress Principle tracked thousands of workday diary entries and found that the biggest daily driver of motivation is visible progress, more than a raise or a pep talk or anything you can say to them. So make the win visible. Don't tell them they're doing great. Show them the two points and let the distance do the talking.

3. Future: draw the line forward, then stop talking. Extend the arc out loud and let them finish it. This is the move everyone rushes and ruins. You do not announce the future. You draw two points, start the third, and go quiet. People believe their own reasons, not the ones you hand them. Robert Cialdini built half his career on that one fact: self-generated reasons stick where your pitch slides off. And when the person says the future out loud themselves, holding the bright version up against where they are right now, that contrast is the pull. Gabriele Oettingen spent twenty years proving it and gave it a name: mental contrasting. The wanting isn't enough. The gap between the future and the present is what creates the motion.

That's the conversation. Three points, and the customer talks themselves across them.

How does the past, present, future method work in any business?

The method transfers to any business with recurring customers or members. A gym shows a member the push-ups they could not do in January. A consultant shows a client the pipeline before and after the engagement. A financial advisor shows three decades instead of one red quarter. A software founder reminds a user what their workday looked like before the product. Same three points, different room. The decision moves off price and onto direction in every one of them.

The kid is the true story. The rest of these I've watched play out in a dozen forms, and the math never changes.

The gym member at the front desk, finger hovering over cancel. The weak move is to reach for a discount, to hand her one more reason to argue about $39. The strong move is three points. "In January you couldn't do one full push-up. Today you did twenty. Where are you a year from now if you don't stop?" She re-ups on the arc. The price never comes up, because you gave her a bigger number to look at.

The consulting client who decides, out of nowhere, that the retainer feels expensive. Past: four leads a month and a founder doing sales at midnight. Present: forty leads and a real pipeline. Future: what twelve more months of compounding actually builds. They renew on the direction. The invoice was never the conversation. It only became the conversation because nobody drew the other two points.

The financial advisor whose client wants to bail after one ugly quarter. One red number is a single point, and a single point always looks like a cliff. Three points across thirty years looks like what it is, a line with some weather on it. This is the future-self problem exactly. Hal Hershfield famously showed people age-progressed photos of themselves and watched them start saving more, because for the first time the future person felt real enough to protect.

The founder watching a good user churn. That user has flat-out forgotten what their Tuesday looked like before your product existed. They're standing on the second point with no memory of the first. Show them the line.

One claim, four rooms, same three points. The method moves across industries because the wiring underneath it does.

Should you show customers the cost of not deciding?

Yes. Every present moment has two lines leaving it, not one: the arc if the person continues, and the flat line if they stop. Naming both is honest, not manipulative. The bright future is the prize, and the cost of inaction is the shadow it casts. Holding the wanted outcome against present reality is what researchers call mental contrasting, and it produces more motion than focusing on the upside alone. Draw both lines and let the person choose which one is theirs.

In A Christmas Carol, the future is a threat. The third ghost is there to scare Scrooge straight, and it works.

Real life runs the other way. The future you're drawing is usually the bright thing: the kid who can stand his ground, the business that runs without you in the room, the client who retires early. That's the line you want them looking at.

But there are always two lines leaving the present, not one.

There's the arc if they keep going. And there's the flat line if they stop: the confidence that never gets built, the push-up that's still zero next January, the pipeline that quietly empties out. You are not threatening anyone by naming the flat line. You're just refusing to pretend it isn't there. Drawing both lines and letting the person choose which one is theirs is the most honest version of selling I know. It also happens to be exactly what the research says moves people.

What the mother saw

A few weeks in, I sat down with her.

I walked her through the three points. The shy boy who couldn't ask a question. The boy from last Tuesday who had, once, quietly, spoken up in class without being asked. And then I drew the line forward. What does this kid look like at ten if he keeps going. At sixteen. A young man who can hold his ground, who finishes what he starts, who will accomplish more than most adults ever let themselves.

She started to cry.

Not because I sold her anything. I hadn't mentioned money once. She cried because for the first time, someone had stopped and shown her the whole arc of her own son, and it was so much bigger than "fun," and she had very nearly missed it.

That's the real job. Forget the close and the renewal for a second. The job, whether you're a parent, an owner, an advisor, or just the person staring at your own goals at eleven at night, is to stop and draw the three points, because almost no one ever does.

Your customer doesn't need a better offer someone to show them the line they're already on.

Price is just what people argue about when nobody drew the line.

One thing to do with this

Pick one decision you're sitting on right now. A renewal you're dreading, a price you're nervous to name, a quit-or-keep-going you keep moving to tomorrow.

Find the three points. Where it started, specifically. Where it is now. Where the arc is heading if you don't stop.

Then hit reply and tell me all three. I read every one, and I'll tell you which point you're leaving out. It's almost always the same one.

Most people will decide on price. You're not most people.

Educational and business coaching only, not psychotherapy.