The synthetic fabric of the chair is sticking to the back of my legs. Just a little. A faint, persistent hum is bleeding through the wall from the server room, a constant B-flat of corporate anxiety. Across the desk, my manager slides a single sheet of paper, its corner still slightly curled from the printer’s heat. My numbers are on it. Black ink, 12-point Calibri. I hit 118% of my target.

He clears his throat. “This is good. Solid work.” I start to feel the tension in my shoulders ease, just a fraction. But his eyes don’t match his words. They’re already moving past the 118%, down to a gray, italicized number at the bottom of the page. The ghost at the feast. 158%.

“But,” he says, and there it is. The pivot. “We need to talk about why we didn’t get closer to the stretch goal.” The air in the room changes. The 118%, a number that represents thousands of hours, hundreds of late nights, dozens of missed family dinners, is instantly reframed not as a victory, but as a 40-point deficit. My success has been redefined as a failure.

This is the brutal, elegant cruelty of the stretch goal. It’s not a motivational tool. It’s an instrument of psychological extraction, a mechanism designed to create a permanent state of inadequacy. It’s a management philosophy that posits the ideal employee is one who is always falling short, always feels indebted, and is therefore always willing to give more. It weaponizes ambition and turns it against you. The goal isn’t to get you to 158%. It was never about 158%. The goal was to get that extra 18% out of you-the work you did beyond the actual, reasonable target-while making you feel like you still owe the company another 40%.

They have created a debt that can never be paid.

I admit, I used to champion this nonsense. Years ago, on a different team, I set a stretch goal to reduce our department’s error rate by 88%. The real, sane goal was 28%. I pushed my team, I pushed myself, we worked weekends, fueled by stale pizza and a shared delusion of grandeur. We hit a 48% reduction. By any objective measure, it was a phenomenal achievement. But because I had anchored our psychology to that impossible 88%, the victory felt hollow. We weren’t heroes who had nearly halved the error rate; we were failures who had missed our target by 40 points. I burned out two good people and it cost the company an estimated $88,888 in attrition and replacement costs. My great ambition was just a colossal, expensive mistake. I was so busy trying to be a legend I forgot to be competent.

My friend Orion S.-J. would never make such a mistake. His entire profession is built on the opposite principle. Orion is a quality control taster for a high-end chocolatier. His job isn’t to ‘stretch’ a flavor profile; it’s to identify it with absolute precision. He can tell you if a batch of 88% cacao is actually 87.8%. He can detect a trace of acidity from beans fermented for 8 hours too long. For Orion, success isn’t an ever-receding horizon. It is a definable, achievable, and repeatable state of excellence. There is no ‘stretch goal’ for perfection; there is only perfection. Anything else is a flaw to be corrected. He once told me about his cousin, a new father, who was agonizing over a performance review exactly like mine while simultaneously trying to shop online for his new baby. The guy was completely overwhelmed. Orion’s advice was simple: “Focus on the real standard. They’re telling you to chase 158% at work, and you’re so stressed you can’t even figure out which baby clothes are any good. Stop chasing their ghost. Find the real measure of quality in what matters.” He said that whether it’s getting the cacao percentage right or finding well-made Infant clothing nz, the principle is the same: the goal must be real, attainable, and fit for purpose, not some arbitrary number on a spreadsheet designed to make you fail.

I find myself thinking about peeling an orange. It’s a strange tangent, I know, but stay with me. The other day, I managed to peel a whole orange in one long, unbroken spiral of zest. The peel sat on my desk, a perfect, fragrant coil. The fruit was whole, undamaged. A small, complete act. There was a beginning, a middle, and a clean end. It was satisfying precisely because it was finite. It was whole. The modern workplace, with its cult of the stretch goal, has tried to eliminate that feeling. It wants work to be a jagged, torn thing, a task with no clean edges, no possibility of a perfect, unbroken peel. It demands we live in a state of perpetual fragmentation, always reaching for a piece that is designed to be out of reach.

This system doesn’t create high performers. It creates anxious people who are terrified of being found out. It normalizes overwork as the baseline and treats burnout as a personal failing rather than a systemic inevitability. The conversation changes from “What can we achieve?” to “How much can we endure?” The manager in that room, asking about the 158%, isn’t a villain. He’s a cog in the same machine, likely facing his own impossible stretch goal set by his own director. He’s just passing the pressure down the line. It’s a cascade of manufactured failure, trickling down from a boardroom where someone read a book about ’10x thinking’ and decided to apply it without any regard for human cost. The cost is immense. It’s the talented developer who quits to go freelance, not for more money, but for sanity. It’s the marketing specialist who hits 128% of her lead-gen target but is denied a full bonus and quietly starts looking for a new job. It is the slow, corrosive drip of knowing that your best will never be defined as good enough.

Orion is tasting a new batch now. I can picture him. A tiny square of dark chocolate on his tongue. He closes his eyes. He’s not looking for something more, something stretched or exaggerated. He is searching for a specific, true note. A clear, resonant chord of raspberry from a Madagascan bean, perfectly roasted for 18 minutes. He finds it. He nods, makes a note on his clipboard. The batch is correct. It is complete. It is enough.