We adventurize, and thus grow, by making the opportunity for risky endeavors. We invite risk by having goals. Without goals, risk is just meaningless uncertainty. Imagine playing the lottery if you had no goal of increasing wealth. With no preference of how much you win, losing the lottery and winning the lottery are equally…meh. However, when I care about making more money, I move towards opportunities to increase my wealth and away from anything that would decrease it. Risk lies when both of these outcomes are possible.
How do we define goals?
If you’ve read The Comfort Crisis, you’ll know about the concept of Misogi. A misogi is a difficult undertaking meant to define your year and reset your soul. There are two rules for defining a misogi:
- Do something that’s fucking hard
- Don’t die
We can generalize these rules: we don’t want to define goals where the possibility of succeeding is practically nonexistent but also we don’t want our goal to be too easy to achieve. One new rule I’ll add: we also need to measure if we have accomplished our goals or not.
Value tree analysis is a tool to decompose goals, ie objectives. In this framework, there are two types of objectives: fundamental objectives and means objectives. Fundament objectives generally reflect what we want on a foundational level, and means objectives general reflect how to accomplish a fundamental objective. For example, “I want to improve my 5km time” is a fundamental objective and “I want to run 5km per day” could be a means objective for “I want to improve my 5km time”.
Generally, we want to start with fundamental objective. A fundamental objective frees us from constraining ourselves to a particular adventure. There are many ways to improve other than running 5km everyday. So by starting with a fundamental objective, we focus on what we want and can worry about how to accomplish it later.
How do we get a fundamental objective?
We start with some objective then ask ourselves: “why do I want this?”
- So let’s say we start with an objective to run 5km everyday.
- Why do I want to do this?
- Because I want to improve my time
Improving our 5km time then becomes our fundamental objective. But we don’t have to stop there, we can keep asking ourselves why we want to do this until we can’t come up with an answer. “Why do I want to improve my 5km time?” Etc etc.
Let’s get on the same page though. One person’s means objective could be another persons foundational objective. It’s entirely OK to start with an objective like “I want to run 5km everyday”, ask yourself why you want that, and respond with “because I just do”.
When we feel like we have our foundational objective, we can start refining it to be more concrete and measurable. After all, if we have a vague goal and don’t know how to measure succeeding, then we’re setting ourselves up for failure. To move our goal to something concrete and tangible, we ask ourselves another question: “what do I mean by that?”
Consider again our example goal: “I want to improve my 5km time”. What do we mean by this? Improve compared to what? My last official race? My last run around the neighborhood? What do I mean by time? Time Strava measures? Chip time? By when do you want to achieve this goal? We need to make our goal specific. The more specific our goal is, the more straightforward it is to measure success.
In summary
Let’s summarize:
- Start with a goal.
- Ask yourself why you want to achieve this goal. Keep asking until you say “because I just do”.
- Ask yourself what you mean by your goal. Remove any ambiguity and make your goal very specific.
