Anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time knows that I have a tortured relationship to goals.
Check that.
I have a tortured relationship to other people’s relationships to goals. Me and goals are just fine having mutual respect but little camaraderie.
But everyone else wants goals. Or at least they want to want goals in the absence of having a satisfyingly clear and intense sense of life to drive them forward without clear goals.
Scott Adams and Venkatesh Rao have both written stuff that affirms my anti-goal disposition. Especially the concept of planning to start instead of planning to finish. That resonates.
I like progress and consistency that compound more than I like any particular goal the compounding is supposed to achieve by a certain time. Like driving. The best driving is free and open highway driving where you don’t have a speed goal, you just speed up when it feels too slow, slow down when it feels too fast, and keep moving in the direction you desire.
I want happy accidents. I want turns I didn’t plan for. I want to drive forward as if it’s the only way until a new way pops up. Planning to start allows this, where plotting the whole path to the finish doesn’t.
This is fundamentally how I approach my own life and how I think careers are best approached. The challenge is how to scale this approach when you’re not flying solo.
I think I’ll write about this in my Friday newsletter this week. Thanks for the idea brain.