Goals

What are goals?

Goals are measurable, specific outcomes that serve as markers of your progress in your purpose. Goals provide daily direction, a measure of progress, and a source of motivation.

Your purpose will absorb any effort you invest into it, so decomposing your purpose into goals is essential to providing you with a sense of progress in your purpose. Goals provide a measurable surrogate for progress in your purpose, which itself can never be finished. As you accomplish goals, you provide evidence that your purpose, qualities, and values are being lived up to.

Goals transform what you want from a short-lived and ill-defined wish to a prioritized plan whose daily execution assures that you will accomplish exactly what you set out to do. Goals provide greater detail than higher layers of the life plan, moving further into the realm of daily action. Goals answer the question of what you will accomplish with the tasks you spend your time on, while tasks answer the question of how you will accomplish your goals.

Goals are an essential source of motivation beyond tasks alone, providing reasons to increase intensity, persevere against opposition, and endure delays in order to achieve them.

Writing goals

To write a goal, describe the conditions under which the goal will be considered achieved. A goal consists of measurable and specific criteria that describe the finished state of the goal.

A good goal answers the question: “What is the best outcome worth accomplishing?” In the life plan, each of your goals should help convincingly persuade you that you are advancing your purpose to the greatest possible degree.

Often, goals will include constraints that set boundaries on how the goal will be accomplished. Perhaps the most common constraint is a deadline, which some people find helps them accomplish more in less time. Other constraints could indicate what resources you must or can’t use in accomplishing the goal.

Enumerating goals

Goals are generated through intentional reflection. There are many specific techniques that can help you brainstorm goals.

You can enumerate goals by asking: “What measurable accomplishments would indicate that I am making the best possible progress in my purpose?”

You can generate goals by asking what outcomes you desire. For each, ask why you want it. Through identifying why you want what you want, you can revisit what you want asking whether it is actually the best fulfillment of why you want it. If something else would better meet your motive, make that your what instead.

Specifying time frames might help spur ideas for goals. How do you want the world to be a better place as a result of what you do today? This week? This month? This year? You can envision the big picture by considering the whole scope of your life, describing it as if you were looking into a crystal ball and writing your own ideal eulogy. For each time frame, list goals you would need to accomplish in order to live up to the person you describe.

A similar technique involves enumerating goals across separate domains of life, such as relationships, work, and spirituality. For each, describe the ideal outcomes, and then formulate goals around your descriptions.

Use your life plan to choose goals that you believe will yield the greatest joy

It is difficult to underestimate how important our choice of goals is in maximizing how much joy we experience. Joy comes from enduringly experiencing what we value. Your goals will orient your daily action toward maximal long-term value as you work on them and mark your progress along the way as they are accomplished.

Defining what you want is vital for optimizing your actions. You can’t optimize without first defining what you want. It's all the more important to specify what you want in the ever-increasing complexity of the modern world. The more complex the circumstance, the less likely you are to get the best outcome without defining your intent, and the greater the difference will be between the best outcome and other outcomes.

What you want is not just a question of arbitrary feeling. It ought to be based on what you value, and by how much, both of which ought to be rationally determined and backed by solid reasons. If you really want to understand what you want and how much you want it, you’ll need to know why you want it.

An optimal goal will maximize your present joy given your circumstances and ensure your placement on the path to even greater joy. A suboptimal goal will vastly decrease the amount of joy you experience presently and, in the worst case, could also impose a hard limit on the joy you can obtain later.

Revising goals

From time to time, you should revisit your goals. We should expect the goals we set to change over time as we learn more about ourselves, others, and life. As you learn more about yourself and reality, the prioritization and content of your goals will shift. As you gain more time and experience, you need to ensure that what is written in your life plan completely reflects your present thoughts, feelings, and actions.

When the time comes to review your goals, ask:

• Do your goals most effectively orient your daily tasks to the greatest possible progress in your purpose?
• Are your goals the most accurate way of measuring how well you are living the character qualities you desire?
• Do your goals maximize the value you experience in life? The greatest joy comes from setting your goals based on what has the greatest value. As we gain more experience and knowledge in life, what we value changes, and so should our goals.
• Do the relationships between your goals and the other portions of your life plan align with the beliefs you have written there?
• Have you found and are you following the best way to accomplish your stated goals with the least resources to ensure maximum resources for lesser goals?
• Do your goals have a clear ordering by importance, and do you execute tasks according to that prioritization?

You will get the most out of your goals as you continuously update your goals to reflect changes in your understanding and circumstances over time.

Good goals bridge the flow of meaning from purpose to task

Your goals are essential to connecting your transcendent purpose with the daily tasks you will accomplish each day to advance in your purpose.

Without a life plan, your daily tasks will tend to be dissociated from what matters the most and will fail to provide much meaning to you. Having and living according to a life plan will help you perceive measurable progress in everything that matters most to you each day.

In order to fully transmit the meaning of your purpose down to the tasks you will accomplish each day, your goals must be completely aligned with the rest of your life plan. Your goals should demonstrate who you are, as described in your qualities section. They should also be prioritized based on your values.

Goals are an essential way to enjoy the journey towards your purpose. When fully aligned with your purpose, your goals give you a way to advance the joy you foresee in their eventual accomplishment down to the tasks that might otherwise be boring or meaningless. Formulating what it takes to accomplish your desires links the joy you associate with the outcome to the otherwise boring, difficult, or meaningless tasks you need to do to accomplish your goal.

Good goals will justify tasks that are more challenging than you would otherwise undertake. Goals give you sufficient reason to do more and better than you otherwise would. Without them, you will lack the motivation and meaning to act up to the fullness of your potential. With them, you have an exact measure to which you must stretch in order to match the meaning you are after.

Purpose-focus helps you stay consistently motivated between goals

Many people practice goal setting and accomplishment, and know well what downsides exist in the typical approach. Goals are great for motivating the start of a new endeavor, but their power begins to wane as you progress. You can experience sudden reductions in goal-based motivation when you encounter unexpected obstacles and even when you achieve what you set out to do. Furthermore, fixation on a goal can make it more difficult to notice and adapt to new information that would modify or even cause you to replace your goal when needful.

A purpose focus mitigates the downsides of goal setting. When you are purpose-focused, you more evenly maintain a sense of progress and motivation throughout the path to achieving a goal and, once you get there, your connection to the greater purpose will impart the momentum needed to roll right into the very next goal. When your goals are purpose-based, you will not hesitate to revise or replace a goal when it becomes clear that it no longer the best way to orient yourself to your purpose, because the changes better attain what is most important to you.

A focus on purpose is essential to maintaining motivation and meaning during the journey. It is how you achieve the often discussed but rarely explained appreciation of the process, not just the outcome. The problem with traditional goal setting is that these goals stand alone instead of being connected to an overarching purpose.

In order to extract all the value of purposed-based goals, you need to align yourself with the desired outcome by actually enumerating and fully engaging in tasks that you are convinced will lead to the outcome you seek. While you engage only partially with these tasks, or when they do not convince you of eventual victory, you will not experience the interim feelings of fulfillment that, in aggregate, outweigh the payoff at the goal’s accomplishment. Partial engagement feeds together with less-than-perfect confidence in your eventual victory, fueling a negative feedback loop leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.

The reward along the way, when properly engaged, will dwarf the reward at the end of the path. Goals will get you there, as long as they are aligned toward and prioritized according to impact on your purpose.

What is an audacious goal?

Goals should be audacious. Audacious means bold, daring, and without respect to the expectations of others. Audacious goals attempt more and better than what already is, and they do so through discovering and weighing the opportunity and danger of potential options.

An audacious goal will not be what everyone else does. Audacious goals recognize that exemplary outcomes cannot come through normal actions. An audacious goal will be an option that other people either do not consider possible or do not consider worthwhile. But audacious goals are not reckless.

Audacious goals are the right kind of risk. Risk is the composite of opportunity and danger. While plenty of danger exists in situations with insufficient opportunity to warrant the risk, no opportunity exists independent of danger. Audacious goals are built around situations where the expected opportunity exceeds the expected danger in ways others do not believe, either because they lack the information you possess, they do not employ the danger mitigations you do, or because they undervalue the opportunity you see.

A transcendent purpose requires audacious goals

As we live life day by day, it is fairly common to face existential circumstances. Unexpected tragedy occurs often enough that every person has a catalogue of terrible things they’ve either experienced or witnessed. While you necessarily encounter the existential in your daily life, you don’t contend with it there. The only weapon that can contend with the transcendent difficulty of life is your transcendent purpose in life. The life plan connects your transcendent purpose to your daily life, and your goals are the vital link in the chain that empower you to truly confide in what you claim.

The audacity of your goals is how you will prove to yourself that you actually believe what you claim to believe. Every audacious goal you set and accomplish will add to the body of evidence of the worthiness of your purpose that you will lean on each time you are confronted with a revelation of darkness in life that exceeds what you could otherwise face.

Purpose gives you reasons to make your goals audacious and gives you the power to accomplish them. Goals aligned with and emitted from a transcendent purpose provide motivation that exceeds what a standalone goal can provide in the same way that the sun shines beyond the dark disk of the moon during a full lunar eclipse. Your purpose will crown your aligned goals with motivation that can make all the difference during hard times, and may be the very thing that crowns

you with victory against challenges that would otherwise overcome you. Life contains costs that nothing less than a transcendent purpose can justify. To make life worth living, audacious goals must be attempted, but attempting to accomplish audacious goals without the power of a transcendent purpose will all but guarantee failure, as the price of existence exceeds what goals alone can justify.

Many people set goals, but few experience the power of goals emitted from a transcendent purpose. Anyone can create a goal with any level of commitment to achieving it. Weak commitment will always garner weak results. A goal emitted from a transcendent purpose inherits the supreme priority of that purpose. It carries power that no lesser goal can.

Purpose helps you effectively pursue more than one goal at a time

While many people have suggested the importance of setting goals, few explain how to synthesize them. How do multiple goals work together? Can they? How does a goal fit into the rest of what you need to do in life, since you can’t just exclusively work on the most important goal until complete? How do you switch between many different goals during any given day, when you can only do one thing at a time?

The answers to these questions are not terribly complicated, but they require the universality your life’s purpose alone provides. Other discussions on goals have to make a separation between different segments of life, such as work and home, because they lack a unifying context over which everything in your life can be ranked. The maximization of joy gives us that missing piece.

Purpose provides a practical way to handle having more than one goal at a time. When you pursue all aspects of your life for the same purpose, it becomes practical and even easy to rank goals applying to home, work, and every other facet of your life. Your purpose gives you a way to universally compare and connect each of these parts of your life, which makes it possible to mix and match different tasks from different goals based on the overarching progress in your purpose. A transcendent purpose provides the necessary power to prioritize all subordinate pieces of the model in a terrifically flexible manner.

Prioritizing goals

An important part of the life plan is making space for the most important things. Living a life plan will provide you with more resources in at least two ways: first, by freeing up the resources occupied by low impact actions and emotions, and second, by replacing them with high impact actions and emotions, which share the quality of increasing your resources.

Writing and prioritizing your goals will help you make space for the most important things, ensuring adequate resources are allocated for the greatest possible outcomes.

If resources were infinite, there would be no need to prioritize anything, but because resources are finite, all goals compete with each other to a certain degree. As a consequence, it’s important to understand the relative priority difference between goals.

The higher the impact of the goals you set, the more likely they are to require significant resources. Audacious goals require greater sacrifice over a longer time than lesser goals. Audacious goals require resources; trying to accomplish them in an already full life is like fitting large objects into an already-full box—it just won’t work.

Goals can be ranked by importance, according to their impact on your purpose. As you consider the resources required for your highest priority goals, you may be surprised at just how few goals you can pursue at once. Though a clear purpose and other aspects of this framework provide you with a mechanism to pursue multiple goals, you will find that your resources will limit progress to the small set of goals most important to you, and cascade towards other goals only after these are completed without being replaced by something more important.

Goals can relate to each other in helpful and unhelpful ways. Some goals will independently contribute to your purpose. Other goals will boost each other, and some goals will diminish one another.

In some cases, one goal will so thoroughly disrupt another that it will make its accomplishment impossible. Any goals that are mutually exclusive to more important goals should be abandoned. A goal could be a wonderful idea in isolation, but still shouldn’t be pursued if a more important goal exists.

Higher impact goals should be prioritized above lower impact goals. Furthermore, the limitation of resources makes it so that goals that boost resources as a result of accomplishing them tend to have a higher priority than goals that do not.

Calculating net benefit

When we speak of benefit, we need to be specific about the units of the value we are using. It is easy to enumerate benefit in an infinite array of things we find beneficial, but this makes it unnecessarily difficult to compare between alternatives. How do you compare the benefit of a delicious plate of food, an enjoyable vacation, and a needed afternoon nap? The key lies in thinking about all benefit in terms of long-term benefit. Fundamentally, all benefit is either joy or something expected to lead to it, and we value it in accordance with how much joy we expect to receive through it.

Most often, audacious goals are not pursued by others simply because most people have a very low tolerance for danger, no matter how great the opportunity. You can very simply calculate whether a risk is worth taking by estimating its expected value:

Expected value = (benefit - cost) x probability of success

If something has a negative expected value, you shouldn’t do it.

Goals should be prioritized according to net benefit. You should do what has the highest expected value among the set of options available to you.

Goals provide a means to define the worth of your progress independent of the perspective of others

As long as you define your self-worth in terms of what others think and do, you will fail to achieve the self-satisfaction that comes from doing your best, and you will be imprisoned by the action or inaction of others.

Other people have different standards than you. Living up to their ideals will not make you feel nearly as good as living up to your own,

because you will feel bad if you neglect your own higher standards for those of others, and you’ll feel guilty and depressed if you fail to measure up to higher standards from others that you never bought into and subsequently never reached.¹

Don’t define your self-worth based on what others think or do. Define it by what you know and what you do. That way, the action or inaction of others and what they think about what you do or don’t do will matter as little as it should.

The only measuring stick that matters is whether you do your best or not. Are you working as hard as you can, as long as you can, and as smart as you can? Are you constantly holding yourself to the standard of being the best person you can be? Are you living up to your standards in what you do, in what you think about, in what you desire, and how you treat others?

Goals as problems

Goals and problems are actually different lenses on the same thing, though both words are used ambiguously. A goal is usually a desired outcome. A problem is every aspect of a start state that precludes the desired outcome.

Problems must be solved in order for goals to be achieved. In some related literature, some authors refer to “projects” as a related concept to goals and tasks. In the life plan, there is no real need for projects as a separate idea. A project is the implementation of the solution to a problem, or the tasks you will perform to achieve all causes required to obtain the effect described by the goal.

All goals require you to recognize the start state, even if you don’t think of it formally as a problem, because you can’t enumerate the steps to accomplish a goal without knowing your start state. Recall that beliefs are reputed mappings of cause and effect. Your beliefs will provide you the connection between your goals and your tasks by suggesting what needs to be done to obtain the outcomes you seek. Your goal describes the effect you seek, and the tasks you will generate are the causes in that particular belief that you have not yet fulfilled. In order to know the causes you have not yet fulfilled, you need to know the ones you have.

Sometimes, you might not already have a belief that provides the outcome you seek through your goal. In this case, the first and most important task in your goal will be to research whether anyone else has been successful in finding what you seek, and to investigate how they obtained it. If you can’t find anyone who has, you’ll have to design your own experiments to try to find the way to what you seek. In almost every case, you can readily follow the example of someone who has successfully solved the problem you face. Devising a novel solution will likely be many more times more difficult and less likely to be successful compared to finding and following the example of someone who already figured it out. To save time, research and exclude every unsuccessful attempt made by others to obtain what you seek.

You can be confident in your efficacy in solving problems when you are engaged in intentional improvement, you recognize problems early, your situation is obviously improving over time, difficult things get easier, and impossible things become possible.

Pay attention to unsolved problems

Goals are not just for finding what you want and do not have, but also of identifying and solving problems, ideally before they become significant.

As you advance in your purpose, you will notice problems that threaten to reverse prior attainments. There is a difference between advancing your purpose and maintaining the purpose advancements you’ve already achieved. To make this distinction clearer, consider the analogy of a general tasked with conquering a country. Taking new areas is different than shoring up those already held, and yet without the latter, the former is fleeting.

Do not ignore the problems you perceive. If you ignore your problems, you’ll never be willing to do what it takes to find and implement a working solution. You need to recognize and acknowledge unanswered needs in order to motivate the necessary search for the solution to problems and to have the willingness to pay the adequate price to solve it.

As we ignore problems, we tend to lose awareness of the scope of negative effects they cause in our lives. Often, our perception of unsolved problems is a hazy middle ground between something that fully occupies our attention and something we are not particularly thinking about. Don’t fool yourself into minimizing the negative drain this causes on your mental and emotional capability and the problems this causes on what you can accomplish.

Each ignored problem is like a oil leak in your car’s engine: If you leave them in your life they will steal vital bandwidth away from advancing your purpose and can cause catastrophic and permanent damage if left long enough.

Each unsolved problem can cause increased friction as we try to progress in life. Reduce the friction in your life by paying attention to and solving problems. If something bothers you, fix it with a priority matching how much it bothers you. As you resolve these seemingly small issues in your life you will begin to focus more and more of your energy on progressing towards your priority.

Anticipate and mitigate problems before they happen

People tend to live life as a chain of reactions to problems as they manifest. Not surprisingly, this exhausting game of whack-a-mole seems to never reach the point where a person feels like they are winning; resources usually give out before the problems stop, and one continues falling further and further behind.

It is possible to get out ahead of the problems. The life plan framework gives you a way to more efficiently handle the most urgent present problems, providing extra space and a mechanism for identifying and solving future problems—most of the time, before they even occur.

While the typical way of living life compounds stress as delay and poor decisions pile upon one another, your life plan creates and sustains a feedback loop that feeds you peace and contentment about your life. Proactivity yields cascading and compounding positive consequences, including more resources, greater peace, less stress, and greater confidence.

For greater meaning, focus on what no one else is willing to do

You may not think you are capable of anything that could carry the depth of meaning described here as necessary for your life’s purpose. Sometimes, what makes a person exceptional is not their capacity to do what no one else can, but their willingness to do what no one else will.

If you ever find yourself contending against self-doubt, just open your eyes and take a look around. Note how difficult it is to find people willing to be consistently good, consistently reliable, or consistently helpful. There are many willing to do what is easy, but far fewer willing to do what is difficult.

Though differences exist in capacity, there are far more critical things left undone due to unwillingness than there are those left undone due to lack of capacity. The modern world sorely needs engaged fathers and mothers, reliable friends, and helpful mentors—none of which requires any special talent, but all of which require uncommon willingness. Competent and trustworthy workers are hard to find in any field. And the list goes on and on.

You can impart a tremendous difference in this world without any special capability at all just by being the only person willing to do what everyone could and should. All you need is an uncommon heart, and that’s fully your choice—no special ingredients required.

For greater meaning, focus on what only you can do

Nearly everyone has a unique combination of skills that make them the best at something under some particular circumstances, and if they don’t, they probably could. Very few people choose paths in life that best leverage their capabilities to the greatest impact.

Focusing on only what you can do is highly likely to generate greater meaning for you in life than other paths could.