Try to turn as many soft, aspirational goals as possible into success criteria, and make them specific enough that you can actually tell whether or not you've met them.
[When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996:] If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of fulfilled prophecy? Consider, for example, eclipses.
An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.
