#55: aims, not goals
👋 Welcome to the 55th issue of Out of Curiosity, a weekly newsletter promoting ideas to help get 1% better everyday.
My name is Reza, and every week, I go through nearly 100 pieces of content (from books and podcasts to newsletters and tweets), and bring you the best in this newsletter.
I stopped setting (and optimizing for) new year’s resolutions a decade ago. The idea of a single point of achievement defining success or failure ceased to resonate with me.
Instead, I switched to setting short-term (1-year) and long-term (3/5/10-year) goals. Setting these specific and measurable goals gave me a sense of clarity and enabled me to make more informed decisions.
Yet, goals, even the short-term ones, fail to provide leeway or flexibility and are often an end-point rather than just one part of an ongoing journey.
While I was doing my annual review this year, one theme that kept popping up was planning in a more open-ended fashion: replacing goals with aims.
This is very much in line with treating life as a journey (a collection of aims), rather than a bunch of finite destinations (goals).
More of a continuous process, less of a finished product.
Aims are not necessarily as tangible as goals, but they can provide a guiding light to explore what lies in between.
Indeed, when I look back at life, most of what I refer to as my major milestones weren’t what I’d set out to achieve as individual goals, but what I stumbled upon while I was aiming in that direction…
And with that, let’s dive into this week’s ideas!
In this issue:
💻 Your career is just one-eighth of your life
🦋 Permission to slow down
🗓 Life lessons from 2022
🚫 Defining "enough"
😌 Optimizing for feelings
💻 Your career is just one-eighth of your life
Don’t take the job you want to talk about at parties for a couple of minutes a month. Take the job you want to do for hundreds of hours a year.
The best kind of work is voluntary: It’s something you choose to do rather than accomplish under the imminent threat of poverty or getting fired. It’s also difficult: Rewarding work is not easy, but an achievable challenge that requires stretching your capabilities and allowing for learning and growth (another reason to explore, instead of just exploit). Finally, it’s worthwhile, which I interpret to mean that it’s intrinsically rewarding.
🦋 Permission to slow down
Short-term productivity is what you do during the day, week, or even month. It’s the checklists and goals and routines and that sweet, sweet dopamine drip of Getting Things Done. But checking off hundreds of boxes does not necessarily translate to a life filled with great achievements. No one has their Asana archive on their tombstone. Great entrepreneurs, authors, creatives, whoever you admire, hardly ever talk about their robust productivity routine and intense notion templates. They’re focused on long-term productivity. A life of great achievements.
🗓 Life lessons from 2022
Having discipline with yourself is loving yourself so much that you will withstand delayed gratification and execute on your dreams rather than letting them sink or lose momentum.
What you admire in others already exists in yourself, it just needs to be cultivated and nurtured.
🚫 Defining "enough"
Wealth created through speculative means is rarely secured by rational actions. Most speculators continue speculating, until, like the athletes past their prime, they quietly exit the scene with a mere fraction of their earlier successes.
😌 Optimizing for feelings
And yet, in so much modern software today, you’re placed in a drab gray cubicle — anonymized and aggregated until you’re just a daily active user. For minimalism. For simplicity. For scale! But if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives and taste.
But if the religion of technology preaches anything, it celebrates progress and evolution. And so we ask, what comes next? What do we optimize for beyond numbers? How do we bring more of the world around us back into the software in front of us?
✨ One last thing…
👋 Until next week,
Great final quote to start the year!