A goal orients you towards something you want. There is a state of being you desire, or something you wish to accomplish, so you choose a way to measure whether you’ve achieved it, and then you work towards it.
I’ve been thinking about an alternative approach to getting where you want to be—without setting goals.
Goals are flawed
There are a few problem with goals:
- It often happens that what you initially desired is no longer desirable, making the original goal not useful anymore and making you feel like you’ve wasted time working towards a goal you did not achieve and no longer wish to achieve.
- When you set a goal, especially for the long term, you’re likely to only consider your present circumstances, ignoring the future circumstances under which you’ll achieve—or fail to achieve—the goal.
- You might not know what you’re capable of if you’re setting a goal in a new area of your life. The goal might be too easy, or it might be unachievable. The first few goals will be guesses until you figure out what’s reasonable for you.
- There’s a tendency to view your attempt to reach a goal as failure if you don’t achieve it, and success if you do. You don’t give yourself credit for the progress along the way if you fail to achieve a goal.
How do we work towards what we want without these problems?
Setting a direction
The alternative approach is to set a direction you wish to head towards and have one metric by which you measure whether you’re headed in that direction.
At any moment, you can see how that metric is doing. If it’s going in the direction you want, then everything’s good. You don’t need to worry because if you keep it up, you’ll achieve any goal that you might have set along this path. We don’t need to think about the goals! Reaching a goal is just a moment in time. What’s more important is the series of moments going towards a goal because that makes up the majority of the time.
Let’s revisit those few problems with goals and see how direction setting might alleviate them.
- No longer wanting what you initially desired. If you only choose a direction and a way to measure progress, those are the things you commit to. You haven’t committed to reaching some far out goal. After a few days, if you feel the direction is not for you, you can change it. There is no wasted time because for that short duration, you did have that direction, and now you have a new one. It’s more manageable to change direction than to change your destination.
- Forgetting to consider future circumstances. With direction setting, you have a general idea of your destination, not a specific one, so there’s no need to think about future circumstances which you can’t predict anyway.
- Not knowing what you’re capable of. If the measurement has big leaps, nothing needs to be adjusted. You’re just going faster than you thought you would. You might also be going slower, but you know whether it’s in the right direction and there’s still nothing to adjust.
- The failure of not reaching a goal. Instead of one big moment at the end where it’s decided if you’ve succeeded, with a direction and measurements along the way, each measurement that indicates the right direction is a success. Likewise, each measurement that indicates the wrong direction is a failure, but it’s the smallest possible one—not a grand failure at the end—and it’s one that can easily be corrected.
An example of direction setting
Let’s take a popular goal of saving money and transform it into a direction with incremental measurements.
In traditional goal setting, you might want to save $10,000 by the end of the year. You set this goal because having that much money saved will provide a safety net in case you lose your job. With this number in mind, anything less may feel like you haven’t met your goal, and anything more will clearly be a success. The path towards the goal is one of struggle and sacrifice since you have to spend less frivolously to save that money.
In direction setting, you wouldn’t come up with an arbitrary number like $10,000. It’s arbitrary, because why not $9,500? That amount is better than nothing. Unless you know you’re getting billed for exactly that much when you don’t have a job, there’s no basis for picking a specific number.
Instead, you can say that your direction is to have more money saved in case of an emergency. You can tell whether you’re headed in this direction by checking if your savings account balance went up or down today. Or it could be compared to last week, last month, etc. You pick a time frame that makes sense. For each time frame, writing the measurement and the direction of change helps you visualize your progress. Is your measurement trending in the direction you want it to be? If so, then all is good. Keep it up, and you will hit the $5,000, $9,500, $10,000, or any other savings milestone you would have set in traditional goal setting as you go in that direction.
Abstract goals
This also works for abstract goals, though a little differently.
For example, instead of having a goal to become a painter, you would put your focus on simply going in that direction. Each day, you do one thing that contributes to that direction. It could be producing a finished painting, adding a single brushstroke, or attending a painting event. As long as you keep up the streak of doing painting-related things, over the course of time those will build up so much that at some point, you wouldn’t hesitate to call yourself a painter. It’s the continuous effort, day after day, of small advances that get you there. It’s easier to manage these daily advances than it is to manage the sudden leap that achieving a goal implies.
My direction, recently
I’ve been working on an independent business venture, but I don’t have any goals for it. I do want it to grow to a size that can sustain me and a few other people. I’d be happy with that, so that’s my direction. The measurement I use right now is how much revenue it’s making each month. As long as it’s going up, I’m headed in my desired direction, and that’s all I need to know. I don’t need to dwell over an arbitrary monthly revenue milestone and how I haven’t reached it yet.
I do realize that to some, this may seem like a lack of ambition, but that ambition comes with a hidden cost that I’m okay with not paying. Life is more enjoyable without it.
What’s your direction?