I Have No Goals
And I don't want any. I think the hyper-focusing on goals these days is short-sighted and irrational. I'm listening to Tim Ferris #329 with Jason Fried and he said the same shit. I thought I was alone. Why I have no goals:
-We don't know what we don't know
-The best time to make a decision is when you have the maximum amount of information possible and information increases in quantity and quality as time progresses. tl;dr: Last minute decisions are the best decisions. This is gonna be the biggest point of contention, I think.
-Relating to the first point: The world has effectively infinite opportunity. Why pigeonhole yourself into one you happened to recognize at the moment?
IMO, the best state to be in is in a constant state of analysis of oneself and of one's environment and constant state of pivot (buzzword alert, but this one is a good one). In my very limited life experience, the best shit that happens to you is shit you could never have planned for. Don't get me wrong. I have very broad directions I stream toward. But those are all based on principles. And every decision made every moment is just doing whatever I think is the next best move to better align myself with my principles. I have to-do lists, folders, stacks of papers to address, systems for which email to address next, a ton of calendar items, but no goals. I have tasks and values. Goals stem from hubris.
-Scenario A: You run a little company and your goal is to grow profits by 10% this year. You put a plan together which you think will result in such an increase given the information you have at that moment. You execute that plan for a year. You grow profits by 8%. You feel bad and you've spent a year operating on outdated information.
-Scenario B: You wake up and study the environment every single day and make all decisions at the last possible moment. The entire nature of your business has changed a year from now; you're effectively running a different type of company in the same, or maybe even in a different, industry. That company happens to be 5X as profitable as the one you were running last year. You've spent a year operating on timely information.
Metrics are fun but dumb. Goals are just dumb. A vision board would make a cool coffee table but is a bad thing to put on your wall.
I’ll have to listen to that episode, sounds provocative. My $0.02 having not listened yet:
Agree but I think it’s only half the battle. You can work hard to put yourself in a position where the best shit will naturally happen to you (sorry, terribly ineloquent way of saying that). I would say a good portion of my success has been right place, right time, right background.
Agree in theory, but in my experience this is a slippery slope that can lead to analysis-paralysis.
I think the answer to your first point is to be in a constant state of seeking self-improvement and knowledge. I try to be an expert in a small handful of things, a generalist in several others, and to maintain an overall curiosity about the world at large. So like, I want to know everything there is about real estate and nutrition, for instance. But I'll also watch a documentary about how tractors are built. Because I'm a. curious and b. Some day, I might run into a guy who built a fortune building tractors and we form a connection and he gives me a bunch of business. People do business with people they like.
Regarding your second point, I think one should be aware of upcoming decisions they'll need to make. Keep them in your peripheral. Let your subconscious do work on it. But you actually make it your #1 focus, evaluate final bits of information, and pull the trigger at the last moment. That's not procrastination. That's prioritization. imo
I think having no budgets or targets like a 10% GP is pretty dumb. With this sort of stuff I think what we are really trying to do is achieve the bare minimums. To paraphrase, if you planned to achieve 10% GP and didn't even get that... then you are probably not the right person to lead.
Some things can't be accomplished without forethought, significant planning and long-term execution. It helps to have goals to direct and motivate those activities. You make an excellent point: constantly reevaluate your goals as you get more information. But the idea that setting a goal is dumb in and of itself? I don't buy it.
Goal: Grow a management company to 1,000 units Direction: Grow a management company and continuously increase efficiency
Fair enough, and probably an important distinction to make. If you operate best that way on an individual level then more power to you. But as a leader of a group/organization, though certainly not without its pitfalls, goal-setting can be a pretty effective tool to raise everyone's game.
Nice read.
Part of the reason I stopped paying attention to people like Ferris is that I can't help but write off his ideas as poorly-envisioned stoner thoughts. My reaction to this one is simply "why not both?"
This ^
I think often people become so hyper focused on one goal that it can cause them to overlook other great opportunities.
I guess for me I look at things backwards.. a set of loosely defined goals (More; how envision my life ending up) and spend my time gathering knowledge and constantly exploring the things that will propel me towards that point.
Maybe young people (me) are afforded this luxury because I surely don't know if what i'm pursuing now is the "end-all-be-all" for me. I'm not sure how you can ever truly find what you are naturally best at (most likely to become ultra-successful at) unless you remain open-minded and curious about other people's success.
On the flip side, I don't know how Ferris argues that not having goals is the answer when goals are a great benchmark for performance, because goals can be big and small. I also believe goals should be measurable on your own account and not involve others, for example, I wouldn't agree that is reasonable for someone's goal to be "get a promotion at work", the goal should be to do/achieve whatever thing(s) will warrant that promotion, and then to hope it works out.
I have always been more concerned about the "ends" rather than the "means to the ends". I am definitely not married to the idea of status or prestige within the finance industry. As OP mentioned, if I met some guy selling tractors and I knew I could make more money, why not explore that opportunity?
This is basically what I mean. My version of the entrepreneurial mindset is to have values, virtues, and things/ideas/people in your life that make you feel fulfilled, and to reach for those things if you don't already have them. In other words, set goals and be better every day. Part of that means exactly not being inflexible and trying to see new things as they come about.
I actually thought about this from a statistical perspective at first. Think Bayesian; given a prior distribution, why would you not use it? Of course, you'd make every kind of forecast you could and choose a mix of the best ones. No need to lock yourself in to point-in-time measurements.
However, I think there's a nugget of value for someone in virtually everything these guys say. I read the 4-Hour Workweek a long time ago, maybe in 2008 or 2009. I was 1-2 years out of high school at that point. His book changed my life. I reread it a few years later and it had much less impact, as I'd worked full-time by then and met some hardass professionals who could work 13 hours daily. But the message was not lost on me: the 4-hour workweek is about maximizing your time and thinking beyond the conventional constraints of "a job", with that thought process culminating in a workweek that could be just 4 hours or fewer in length. His ideas offer a spectrum of thought or new vantage point to existing ones.
So I guess the best takeaway from this post is that one should remember to constantly evaluate their situation and not commit "goal-lock". Better goals can exist than what we're targeting and we should always re-commit ourselves to our values and continuously evaluate our actions to make sure we're doing our best.
Jason Fried said that - not Ferris. Ferris is cool and shit. I disagree with him often but he's cool.
I've never been deadset on using goals either. I know they work well for some people as motivation though.
One of our CEOs loves using them even though he knows as a new company the future is completely unpredictable and we have no idea if the company will implode or 3x next year. I'm in the same boat as OP to an extent and don't see the point of setting a personal goal around the above because of the sheer amount of uncertainty.
Some things like working out, eating clean, etc... make more sense because they are things you can control 100% (more or less).
I think knowing the direction that you want to go is important, and figuring out how to get there is as well. Goals are mileposts along the way.
To give you two examples:
*I'm actually quite happy where I am, and can get two significant promotions within my current role without really changing my job duties, but the step above that (think MD) is a put up or shut up high stress role. I don't want that, and I'm already the guru/oracle within my little niche. Getting on my firm's GIPS committee would help cement my role where I am, despite churn above and below in my department, and get me those extra two steps to where I want to spend my career. Therefore one of my goals has been to get my CIPM to give me a leg up on all the other charterholders for that committee.
*A recruiter hit me up about the Head of Product position at Direxion last month. It's a huge position, and a huge jump, albeit at a smaller firm than I am at now. I passed b/c I didn't want to be that much of a talking head, and I don't think I'd be very good at being on Bloomberg that much.
https://m.signalvnoise.com/ive-never-had-a-goal-c89219aedddf
I think having goals just keeps me in motion. Your post reads a bit nihilistic, but I tend to feel the same way every once in a while. If I didn't have short, medium, and long-term goals, no matter how petty they were, I'm nervous I'd stagnate and fizzle. This said, I appreciate the sentiment of how you feel.
If you don’t set any expectations anything good that happens will be a huge surprise, just try to have fun and not waste life always trying to climb higher and living unsastisfied no matter what
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