This one is about setting goals. In my last post I wrote from experience about some ways to approach problems of willpower to increase our chances of doing the things we most want to do. Closely related to that is the practice of goal-setting. Your goals are the work that willpower performs, and if they’re stated in detail and align well with your deepest values, you’ll have an easier time justifying the work to carry them out.
I’m writing this as someone who resisted planning out long-term goals for a long time, for good-sounding reasons that I’ll describe below. Then last year I became convinced I should just do it, so I did. This post is what I would tell my past self about goal-setting—reasons to do it sooner and ways to do it better.
But I don’t wanna
One of the most dreaded interview questions is the classic, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I can think of several reasons people hate answering it:
If you’re a whimsical thinker, you might feel that planning out the trajectory of your life kills the wonder of it. Why force yourself to follow a five-year plan, when you can find excitement in all the big and little surprises that life brings?
- To that I now say, even if spontaneity and living-in-the-present is your thing, you need to arrange for an environment where good things happen spontaneously and disastrous things do not. To be carefree (without putting everything you love at serious risk) is a gift you earn by handling all the gravest cares ahead of time.
If you’re a stoic thinker, you might feel like you’re putting your mental health at risk by staking expectations on things you can’t fully control. Why not just accept the events of each day as they come?
- To that I say, you need to accept the messy fact that you have partial control over many things in your life and future, and these add up to a great deal of control overall. You are not a poor Greek slave with nothing to do; you have huge opportunities, whether or not you acknowledge them. Don’t let fear of failure masquerade as wizened stoic detachment.
If you’re a critical thinker, you might be daunted by the level of uncertainty that exists five or ten years out. Wouldn’t it be irresponsible to make concrete claims about what you’ll want, in the face of so many unknowns?
- To that I say, knowing your future and planning your future are two different things. You never have to claim to know that your goals will get fulfilled or that they’ll be worthwhile. Accept all the uncertainty in your plans, and plan them anyway, because a 20% chance of success is much higher than 0%.
If you’re an economical thinker, you might see this in terms of opportunity cost, and you’ll realize that setting a long-term goal is basically committing to a huge opportunity cost, for zero compensation in the present. It feels like a loss.
- To that I say, you should accept that opportunity cost anyway, and here’s why: When a better opportunity presents itself, your choice will simply be whether to stick to the original goal, or pivot. If you hadn’t set an original goal, your choice will come with the weight of this abrupt new degree of commitment. It’s much easier to withdraw your commitment from one thing and put it into something else, than to come up with it out of nowhere in the moment.
Take your time
If you want consistency (more on that below), you need to come up with a goal that will be central in your mind for months and years in a row. That’s no easy task. I’m a different person than I was two years ago. I like different things, I know different people. I live on a different side of the country. In order to set goals that have a chance of lasting through all my personal and environmental changes, I need to think very deeply about what I value fundamentally.
It took me about the whole month of April 2020 to come up with well defined goals for just three years out (and some less defined desires for six years out). I journaled for days and days; I started with minor, narrow goals, tried to predict where they’d end up, and tried to guess whether they’d be worth it. I tried to reason about which goals might end up supporting other goals, so that there could be something like a hierarchical order of priorities.
Whether you’re into journaling and lists and spreadsheets like I am is not the point. Whatever your own process is for deciding things, you need to do a lot of it for a decision that’s meant to last years. You want to try to “price in” all the ideas and drawbacks and excuses that your future self will encounter, that would cause you to change the goals down the line. Identify them now, and make the changes now, before committing.
Write it down
This is conventional advice you’ve probably heard before. You need to put your goals into writing, so that they stay the same even as your thoughts and feelings change over time. You should write them in a place where you can see them regularly.
Related: you should structure them so that they can be broken into multiple shorter-term goals. Your long-term goal can be broken into yearly goals, and yearly goals can be broken into four seasonal goals. Seasons can be broken down (imperfectly) into three monthly goals each, or into weekly goals—13 weeks per season. 13-week goals are kind of popular anyway.
I keep my goals on a spreadsheet with collapsible rows for seasons, months, and weeks.
Don’t write it all down
A long time ago, someone smarter than me wrote out a set of standards for how to think critically and form correct beliefs. That’s not what this post is about, but I found that one of the rules there ties into goal setting quite well.
Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.
If you fail to achieve a correct answer, it is futile to protest that you acted with propriety.
…You may try to name the highest principle with names such as “the map that reflects the territory” or “experience of success and failure” or “Bayesian decision theory.” But perhaps you describe incorrectly the nameless virtue. How will you discover your mistake? Not by comparing your description to itself, but by comparing it to that which you did not name.
He called this concept the Void, and I thought it was just esoteric silliness for about a year until it clicked. It’s called the Void because if you called it anything standard, you might pursue that other thing instead of what you were really after. We could say it’s a situation where there’s an extreme risk of surrogation/Goodhart’s law—there is no symbol out there that faithfully represents the substance, so it’s dangerous to rely too much on any one symbol (and “symbol” here means the words you use to refer to it). In the case of forming correct beliefs: You could call it “critical thinking,” but what if you end up overly critical of all ideas, including well-grounded ones? You could call it “being right,” but what if you end up afraid to confront uncertainty (and risk being wrong)? You could call it “forming correct beliefs,” but what if your peer group manages to change your definition of “correct”? As Yudkowsky says, “How will you discover your mistake?”
The point of the Void is that you don’t name your highest directive, because if you did, you might end up following “the letter of the law” and still get the wrong answer. In the context of setting a goal: you might achieve the goal as it’s written, or maximize the metrics you’d planned to maximize, and then find that, somehow, you wish you’d spent your time differently. Think of the genie that grants people’s wishes, but only in pedantic technical ways. Your future self is your genie.
But of course, as I mentioned above, you still need to set literal goals, or you won’t get anything done at all. So when I set long-term goals, I try to think, “What’s the possible future where I achieve this yet am unhappy?” Often the answer surprises me. But when those possible futures seem very unlikely, then I accept the goal. I think it’s important to often keep the principle of the Void in mind—your ultimate “goal in life” probably won’t be faithfully represented by the same set of words year after year.
Evaluating progress
There’s a time for evaluating whether a plan is still working, and a time for blindly following the plan. These need to be kept in balance.
I’ve learned that there is such a thing as being too willing to learn. Too willing to try new things. I used to have this problem in the gym. I’d come up with a weightlifting program, and on day one I’d find myself “improving” the program because of some new information I got. This reinforces two bad things: 1) That you won’t stick to a plan unless it’s perfect, and 2) That you can tweak your plan at any time. Combined, this means you’re always changing plans, which means you’ll lack consistency, which can ruin everything. All worthwhile goals require consistency; no one ever achieved anything challenging without that.
Last year I put a lot of thought into setting some long-term goals. I haven’t changed any of them, and I won’t even consider changing them for another year or two. Whenever you change a plan or program, you should have a distinct feeling that you’re paying a cost. The longer-term the plan, the greater the cost. You’re giving up your consistency for a chance to get a better plan, which would make better use of future consistency. Consistency is required either way, so don’t give it up carelessly.
Wrapping up
This isn’t going to end with a call to action to go and figure out your long-term goals right away. That’s because it’s too big and important to rush—maybe now is not a good time, for whatever reason. Like I talked about in Willpower, sometimes, for the sake of building good habits/momentum, it’s better to not do things than to do them poorly.
To have enough time to sit and think deeply about your goals is a luxury, and we can’t all afford it at a moment’s notice. So all I’ll say is that if you can find time to do it, it’s worthwhile.
