I woke up this morning with a set of goals. After reading this post, my goals abruptly pivoted: I had a strong desire to compose a reply. I like this post and think it is an excellent and appropriate reply to Lionhearted’s (also a nice post), and would have liked to proffer some different perspectives. Realizing that this was an exciting but transient passion, I didn’t allow my goals to be updated and persisted in my previous plans. An hour or two into my morning’s work, I finally recalled the motivation behind my original goals and was grateful. It took some time, though, before I felt emotionally that I had chosen the right set of goals for my morning. Working through those transient periods of no-emotional-reward is tough. You need to have faith in the goal decisions of previous selves, but not too much.
I believe this comment is along the lines of what I would have written yesterday..
If you measure intelligence against the goals we haven’t met, we certainly come up short. However, zooming out to look at humanity as a whole, I am impressed by how productive we are. Huge cities, dozens of them, with gorgeous and functional buildings and everyone milling about being productive, all over the world. The infrastructure of our civilization is enormous. And all the art we output – books, movies, gardens. I think we’re amazingly successful at achieving some types of goals, when seen as a single complex system.
When you zoom in to the individual, I think it becomes more difficult to judge from among the small-scale effects if humans are meeting their goals. The problem of individual success is so complex not only because we have trouble achieving our goals, but because it is a much more difficult task to decide on appropriate goals, and distribute resources among them.
Whatever our goals are, x,y,z; our goal is rarely to “have x, no matter what”. There’s always a trade-off and a limit to the resources we’re willing to expend towards x. Several comments have already mentioned the cost considerations in decision-making about goals. In particular, it can be argued that considering resource costs, one might better pursue nothing than pursue sub-optimal goals – pursuing goals of unknown value sub-optimally may be a reasonable middle ground.
Choosing goals appropriately so as to not waste effort depends upon an environment we have limited information about. Unknown variables and chance play a very large role in whether you will be successful or not. Instead of choosing a goal and directly pursuing it, it can be wise to do nothing and wait for opportunities. In life philosophies, this is described as ‘not fighting the universe’ or ‘yang instead of yin’.
There is a mind-body ‘wholistic’ aspect to meeting our goals, which unfortunately gives the impression that success in meeting goals is a quality or a talent rather than rationality. Only certain goals can be straight-forwardly achieved by designing and following a ‘plan’. I recently finished a terrific book and wondered how that book was written. I doubt the author himself knows. Certainly, there are ingredients: having something to say and recognizing an aptitude for writing, the discipline to keep a writing schedule, etc., but presumably many components of the author’s personality needed to come together to write that book, something that couldn’t be forced but which was permitted. This kind of success in life makes it very difficult to make a connection between ‘plans’ and ‘success’. I personally wasted a lot of mental energy as a child wondering why sometimes things seemed easy and sometimes they seemed hard, because I suspected fate or external intervention. There are many components of our personality we don’t seem to have control of, and the importance of integrating your personality behind a goal eclipses— often – the importance of the having a rational plan. (The point I am making here echoes what was said in this thread.)
Working through those transient periods of no-emotional-reward is tough. You need to have faith in the goal decisions of previous selves, but not too much.
I woke up this morning with a set of goals. After reading this post, my goals abruptly pivoted: I had a strong desire to compose a reply. I like this post and think it is an excellent and appropriate reply to Lionhearted’s (also a nice post), and would have liked to proffer some different perspectives. Realizing that this was an exciting but transient passion, I didn’t allow my goals to be updated and persisted in my previous plans. An hour or two into my morning’s work, I finally recalled the motivation behind my original goals and was grateful. It took some time, though, before I felt emotionally that I had chosen the right set of goals for my morning. Working through those transient periods of no-emotional-reward is tough. You need to have faith in the goal decisions of previous selves, but not too much.
I believe this comment is along the lines of what I would have written yesterday..
If you measure intelligence against the goals we haven’t met, we certainly come up short. However, zooming out to look at humanity as a whole, I am impressed by how productive we are. Huge cities, dozens of them, with gorgeous and functional buildings and everyone milling about being productive, all over the world. The infrastructure of our civilization is enormous. And all the art we output – books, movies, gardens. I think we’re amazingly successful at achieving some types of goals, when seen as a single complex system.
When you zoom in to the individual, I think it becomes more difficult to judge from among the small-scale effects if humans are meeting their goals. The problem of individual success is so complex not only because we have trouble achieving our goals, but because it is a much more difficult task to decide on appropriate goals, and distribute resources among them.
Whatever our goals are, x,y,z; our goal is rarely to “have x, no matter what”. There’s always a trade-off and a limit to the resources we’re willing to expend towards x. Several comments have already mentioned the cost considerations in decision-making about goals. In particular, it can be argued that considering resource costs, one might better pursue nothing than pursue sub-optimal goals – pursuing goals of unknown value sub-optimally may be a reasonable middle ground.
Choosing goals appropriately so as to not waste effort depends upon an environment we have limited information about. Unknown variables and chance play a very large role in whether you will be successful or not. Instead of choosing a goal and directly pursuing it, it can be wise to do nothing and wait for opportunities. In life philosophies, this is described as ‘not fighting the universe’ or ‘yang instead of yin’.
There is a mind-body ‘wholistic’ aspect to meeting our goals, which unfortunately gives the impression that success in meeting goals is a quality or a talent rather than rationality. Only certain goals can be straight-forwardly achieved by designing and following a ‘plan’. I recently finished a terrific book and wondered how that book was written. I doubt the author himself knows. Certainly, there are ingredients: having something to say and recognizing an aptitude for writing, the discipline to keep a writing schedule, etc., but presumably many components of the author’s personality needed to come together to write that book, something that couldn’t be forced but which was permitted. This kind of success in life makes it very difficult to make a connection between ‘plans’ and ‘success’. I personally wasted a lot of mental energy as a child wondering why sometimes things seemed easy and sometimes they seemed hard, because I suspected fate or external intervention. There are many components of our personality we don’t seem to have control of, and the importance of integrating your personality behind a goal eclipses— often – the importance of the having a rational plan. (The point I am making here echoes what was said in this thread.)
Yes.