Blog #8: Focusing Life's Optionality and Setting Your Path

Blog #8 in the series on success foundations, Context: male 29 years old

How do we find priority in our lives amidst the optionality and noise? Generally speaking people love goals. But goals like many other elements of our lives get confused. A practical example of this confusion is the new year’s resolution. Everybody loves to say, “My goal is to go to the gym three times a week”. This is not a goal, this is a habit. The same way that we don’t describe brushing our teeth everyday as a goal, so is the same with anything we want to do on a recurring basis. A goal has to be lofty and bankable not subject to an infinite loop of impending mundane failure. 

So how do we create lofty goals and shape our life's work? For me, I wasn’t necessarily born with a singular purpose, or at least it wasn’t clear to me what that singular purpose was. I never quite understood how olympians could dedicate their life to the pursuit of a singular event or professional athletes would say from an early age that is all they wanted to do. My goals have always been subject to new information, sentiments, environments for better or for worse. Developing direction in my life has always taken a bit of work. Focusing my attention has always been a process, starting with the general and moving towards the more specific. To clarify, goals take weeks/months to consolidate and define and wasn’t the result of sitting down one afternoon but multiple iterations over time. 

Q1: What sort of life do I want to lead?

Theme: To lead a happy, long, exciting life with the ability to empower others. 

Q2: What sort of things do I want to be/do?

Goal themes/accomplishments: 

1. Become an Author
2. Become a Teacher
3. Become an Entrepreneur
4. Become a Leader
5. Become an Accredited Investor
6. Become an Adventurer

Q3: What topics am I most interested in that can blend with the above? 

1. Technology
2. Data
3. Self Improvement
4. Efficiency in Process & Systems

Q4: What goal might encapsulate some of these themes? 

For me the goal that helps me accomplish many of these things is to start a self improvement website/blog by the end of 2021.

With this simple goal I can incorporate 4 topics I am interested, while achieving 1,2,3 and working towards 4,5,6 of what I want to be/do.

Now this certainly doesn't capture everything but it is a start.

Additional Notes on crafting the final end goal:

One method that can be helpful, in crafting specific goals is the S.M.A.R.T framework which I think is generally an over engineered intuition but none the less a common reference. It states that every good goal needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time based. 

In general, I don’t like to overthink goals as they tend to change and evolve over time. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't make a record to help us revisit and hold us accountable. Read on or more information on what we are trying to accomplish with this blog.