Goals with or without plans?
24/30 - Should you commit to a goal you don't know how to do? Or only pick goals you already have an idea about?
Everybody has goals. Right now yours might be the tiny goal of “I’m going to read all the way to the end of this post”, or it might “I’ll get to my friend’s music show by 8:30”. You might have some larger goals, things that are signified by precious metals, like to win an Oscar, an Olympic Medal, a Noble Prize – but not that fake Economics one. A real one, like in chemistry or peace. These are all valid goals.
The question is, is it better to proceed with a goal that you have a plan for, or to commit to a goal without having any idea how to accomplish it?
A goal is very different from a plan. I think a lot of people, myself included, confuse and conflate the two.
A goal describes “whither?” And a plan describes “how?”
Ray Dalio counsels us “when setting goals, just set goals. Don’t think about how you will achieve them or what you will do if something goes wrong.”
“Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable. Be audacious. There is always a best possible path. Your job is to find it and have the courage to follow it. What you think is attainable is just a function of what you know at the moment. Once you start your pursuit you will learn a lot, especially if you triangulate with others; paths you never saw before will emerge.”
He Dalip a point: did the Wright Brothers know how to fly a plane originally? As Orville Wright wrote in a letter: “If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.” Similarly, as Jacques Derrida wrote in Invention of the Other: "the only possible invention would be the invention of the impossible". When Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David started witing Seinfeld, neither knew how to write a sitcom, the closest was a weird one-shot David wrote for Gilbert Gottfried called “Norman’s Corner”. And it’s at best a curiosity.
You don’t know what you don’t know. So if you don’t know how, that doesn’t mean you can’t have knowhow, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, the presumption of impossibility may only be temporary.
When people talk about committing to a goal, I think they really mean committing to a specific plan of accomplish a goal. Otherwise what are they committing to? Really their just committing to discovering a way of accomplishing that goal.
If I say “I’m commited to finding a solution to the Rieman Zeta Hypothesis” (which is a portends to find the frequency of prime numbers) that presumably means committing to doing a lot of mathematics, or at the very least code vibing with ChatGPT to write an automated script that will try out different algorithms. It certainly doesn’t imply I’m going to drink beer in my underwear until I magically happen upon a eureka moment “ahh the solution is…!”.
Likewise, if I commit to my goal of attending my friend’s party next Sunday, I may do nothing for the next 5 days towards it. Am I not committed? No. But there is no action necessary.
The point I’m trying to make is that to be committed to a goal you need to have some idea about how you’re going to accomplish it. At the very least you need a sub-goal: a goal to find a way of accomplishing the original goal.
Otherwise being “committed” to a goal is indistinguishable from not being committed.
This means that you can be committed, like Dalio says, to goals that you don’t know how to accomplish yet – provided you have a means of finding out.
However, in my personal experience I find that too much time is wasted on that provisional goal towards a goal. For example, I have literally hundreds of film ideas, most of them fleshed out. Which one I should commit to is an impossible question – there’s so many ways of answering that question with regards to one idea and I have hundreds.
It is far easier to go “which one am I confident could make?” – this narrows it down precipitously only to realistic sounding goals. Which is interesting because there’s often more than one way to accomplish a single goal, and different goals may even have similar plans. And yet when I only have say, 12 plans to choose from, instead of committing to finding plans for 260 goals. It gets way easier.
This troubles me – how many obtainable goals am I dismissing simply because I don’t currently have the knowledge? On the other hand, does obsessing over that simply draw me further away from activity?
Perfection is often the enemy of the good. And accomplishing a goal is better than being paralysed from working on any goal.