Have you ever noticed how, no matter how many hours you work, your biggest goals can still feel just out of reach?

Like many of you who are innovators and practitioners in this field, I want to be the best leader I can be, so that the work that I do creates the greatest possible impact for children and families.

Far too often, I feel like I am not achieving the impact I want. Its not from lack of effort - I set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound), and make detailed plans to achieve them with automated task tracking and measurable OKRs (objectives and key results), and still fall short.

But recently, as I looked back on our last quarter’s goals, something extraordinary struck me: we had made more meaningful progress in 90 days than ever before — with a smaller team, fewer resources, and far more complexity.

It’s not that we achieved everything we set out to do. But we made major strides on incredibly challenging issues in our business. Even more importantly, we spotted early when things weren’t on track — and pivoted fast enough to create better outcomes in just 90 days.

What led to this dramatic change in output?

For years, I thought success meant setting big, inspiring goals and working tirelessly toward them. But with the guidance of my mentor at the Harvard Innovation Lab, Jason Freeman, I discovered something far more powerful: real progress comes from focusing on your biggest and hardest issues first — before anything else.

Working with Jason, I finally grasped a framework I’d heard about for years but never truly understood until now: the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), popularized by Gino Wickman’s book Traction.

When Jason sent me this cheesy YouTube video from the 80’s I was like, really? But the genius of Stephen Covey (author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) is that he very effectively uses an image to enable us to grasp this surprising and counter-intuitive truth: that by identifying and focusing on the big issues, the smaller ones tend to take care of themselves, and we make greater strides towards our goals.

EOS is simple but profound. It’s built on one central idea: that great organizations gain traction not by setting more goals, but by identifying and solving their biggest issues — the ones that quietly hold everything else back.

There is a lot more to EOS. It gives you six key components to align your team — Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process, and Traction — and I highly recommend the book. It forces you to face reality, clarify what matters most, and execute with discipline.

For years, I believed success came from big goals and relentless effort. But through EOS, I learned that progress begins not with dreaming bigger — but with confronting what’s in the way.

It’s uncomfortable to focus on the issues. They’re messy, often emotional, and never as inspiring as a big, audacious goal.

For a long time, I preferred dreaming about the future to facing the friction of the present. I loved visioning exercises and long-term planning sessions — anything that lifted me above the daily chaos.

And I have seen that getting extremely clear on my goals is important (no one is going to stop me from creating my annual vision board!).

But what I’ve learned through EOS, and through working with Jason, is that clarity doesn’t come from dreaming harder. It comes from looking directly at what’s in your way.

As entrepreneurs and innovators, our problem is rarely a lack of imagination. We see possibility everywhere. What we struggle with is turning those visions into grounded execution — and having the courage to confront the obstacles that make progress feel impossible.

But that’s where the real transformation happens. When you name the hardest issues — the ones that keep you awake at night — you reclaim your power to solve them.

What surprised me most was how quickly things began to shift once I started naming the real issues — not avoiding them.

When I started to build my work around problem-solving instead of goal-setting, something powerful happened. The goals didn’t disappear — they came alive. They gained urgency, precision, and purpose.

In just one 90-day cycle, I watched my team and I move from being under-capitalized, with only a few months of runway left, to closing our pre-seed round and building momentum every day.

From feeling stuck on our technical roadmap, to hiring the right people and designing a clear architecture for scaling our AI infrastructure.

The difference wasn’t just what we did — it was how we focused.

EOS taught me to treat issues not as distractions from the “real work,” but as the work. Each week, we prioritized the hardest conversations, surfaced what wasn’t working, and held ourselves accountable to solving it.

And with every problem we resolved, the next one became clearer. The fog started to lift.

Of course, once you solve one big issue, ten more appear behind it. But that’s the nature of building, and what we signed up for!

As Bené Brown says, you make yourself vulnerable when you set out to achieve big things, and you need courage to be vulnerable. Every challenge is an invitation to refine not just my business, but myself.

And I’ve come to see that this is what makes the work meaningful. We don’t build because it’s easy. We build because we believe in what could exist if we just keep going — if we have the courage to face what’s in our way and the imagination to see beyond it.

Each quarter, I now look forward to identifying our biggest issues. They’re not signs of failure anymore; they’re proof that we’re growing, learning, and getting closer to what we set out to do.