I’ve mentioned countless times on this blog that I don’t really have “goals”. I don’t work well with a strict planning, with having a specific target, and try to simply live in the moment and take the most logical step right now.
This has met some criticism, of course. People who say that I clearly do have goals, because I keep finishing projects. Most importantly, I mention that I am going to make that project in advance, and then I can usually mention that it’s done when I write my next quarterly update. That sounds a lot like having goals or targets to hit, right?
Yes, yes it does.
In fact, my biggest areas of work are stories and games. Both of those can’t exist without clearly defined goals! In stories, your characters need to have goals they’re pursuing, or nothing happens. In games, there must be an objective (which explains when the game ends and/or who won). Wouldn’t you say I am actually very familiar with inventing goals and working towards them?
I thought I was clear, but it seems some people misunderstood me. And they were right to question a statement like “I have no goals”. Of course I still have goals! Or I would’ve stopped eating long ago, for example. All day long, we have tiny goals (“need food”, “should get out of bed”, “boot computer”, …) and usually complete those quickly and easily. Even if you “live in the moment”, you still have a goal in that moment. I usually still have some specific thing I decide to do on that specific day.
So … what is it? Do I have goals or not? If people ask me what I’m trying to achieve, I usually have nothing to say. But I also say that I will do something, or that I want to finish something, and then I do. What is really the difference?
I wanted to write this article for a while, but I struggled to find a good explanation. The fact you’re reading this right now means that I found a way!
Goal =/= Expectation
I stumbled upon a message (from an author/publisher) that said something like:
“My AIM is to get published, of course, but I don’t EXPECT to reach it.”
All authors know the struggle. You’re pouring your heart and soul into your stories, dreaming of getting published. Getting recognition, getting a paycheck, getting assurance that your writing is somewhat okay perhaps. It’s extremely difficult, however, to achieve this, or to even get a tiny bit of attention from anyone when it comes to creative work.
And so, most newbie authors (usually children or young adults) have this dream, and then it doesn’t work out (they can’t get their first book published anywhere), and they are demotivated. They stop writing their next book in the series. They start hating the process, or trying to put in “trendy things that will sell”. They ask themselves “will I EVER get published?”, and the spiral of doubt and hesitation begins, which usually ends with quitting writing entirely.
In my experience, the only authors that continue to write (and usually eventually find success) are the ones who can shift their mind-set to the quote mentioned. Those who can write with the goal of creating a masterpiece that will sell, but who don’t expect this to happen. Those who will happily start their next attempt at a masterpiece, even if their last book was ignored by all publishers.
The difference here is that many people (wrongly) conflate goals with expectations (or even certainty of success). They think that having a goal must be the same as expecting to reach it. They think that goals are only worth it if you end up reaching them perfectly. And when it doesn’t happen—because we can’t predict the future, or the goal was just too hard—they have no alternative. They expected to reach the goal. It didn’t work. Now what? With such a fixed mind-set, those people can’t be flexible, can’t adapt, and it all falls apart.
To those people, writing a book that NOBODY wants to publish is deemed a “failure”. Because you didn’t reach your self-imposed goal, you now feel worthless and decide to just give up. While in reality … you wrote a book! Who cares if nobody is interested? Who cares if it’s not so perfect that it will sell? Expecting to reach your goal messes with your perspective and makes you feel much worse and more demotivated … than if you had never expected to reach the goal at all.
So no, HAVING a goal should never be the same as EXPECTING TO REACH THE GOAL. In reality, the opposite is actually true.
It’s About HAVING A Goal
There’s this quote by Reiner Knizia, probably the best and most prolific board game designer ever:
“The goal of the game is to win. But it’s having the goal that’s important, not the winning.”
And I think it just sums up the correct attitude to life (and games, and game design, of course).
A game doesn’t work if there’s no goal. It’s simply not an activity anymore. It’s nothing.
Similarly, a game is far less fun if you’re not really trying to win. If even a single player is distracted, on their phone, playing it “safe”, the game can be ruined completely. Conversely, games where players gave it their all—even if this led to stupid moves and silly moments—are the best. The goal of the game is to win, so that’s what you’re all going to try really hard.
But it’s HAVING the goal that’s important, NOT THE WINNING.
With my board game group, we do not track or even remember who won. We just don’t care; and I know this is true for basically anyone who has played more than two games in their life. Once the winner is announced, we’re like “yay! next game”, and 30 minutes later we don’t even know who won. We’re busy trying our darnest to win this next game.
Without HAVING a goal, there is no structure. There’s no decision space, no actions to choose from, no meaning to anything you do. Without HAVING a goal, there’s no game, no story.
But if you actually REACH that specific goal is almost completely irrelevant.
Who cares if you lose? You’ve just had an hour of fun trying to reach the goal.
One of the core “principles” of storytelling is the “lie that the hero believes”, otherwise known as “want versus need”. It’s said that every hero should start the story believing their goal is X, but the aim of the story is to show/convince them that their goal is actually Y. Their “want” versus their “need”. At the start, the hero “wants” a simple life in their home town, away from magic and danger and monsters. During the story, they discover they actually “need” adventure and magic and danger!
I have seen this to be true in countless stories and stand by this as a good writing principle. In other words, the best stories actually have a goal that isn’t reached. They set a goal, then do their best for 300 pages to show you why that goal is stupid and it should have been a different goal all along ;)
That’s … life.
You set a goal with your current knowledge. This helps pick actions, structure your days, find a path towards reaching it. But life is lived along that journey. You run into obstacles, you learn a few things, and in the end you probably never reach that goal and just set a new goal that’s slightly better (hopefully).
It’s HAVING a goal that’s important. Don’t EXPECT to reach it, don’t attach SUCCESS to it, because whether you reach the goal or how is completely irrelevant.
How To Remember This?
I thought about how to better communicate this (succinctly) in the future. And I decided I might have to stop calling them goals.
I think a better word is aim. (Or, if you come from the world of games like me, you might prefer the word objective.)
You have an aim.
Unsure what to do? Pick something that helps aim better. Pick something that aligns with your current aim.
You suddenly see a much juicier target in the distance? Change your aim! Point your bow and arrow at that thing now, if you feel it’s the right thing to do.
At some point, you shoot. You might hit the target perfectly (“project completed on time and following specification!”). It might be a glancing blow (“I have a few first chapters, but don’t feel there’s a really potent story here”). You might be way off in any case (“woah I didn’t foresee obstacle X and Y, my idea might just be impossible!”).
It doesn’t matter. After shooting your arrow, you pick your next aim, and the cycle starts right over. Keep aiming, sure. Just don’t expect to hit bullseye on every one of them, and call yourself a failure otherwise.
If you want to continue this metaphor even further, you might say that you’re never gonna hit the perfect shot if you stop aiming at all.
Practical Example
So, what does this look like in practice? Let me give some examples.
For years now, ever since I entered our terrible system of education, I had an aim to make it better. My general aim has always been to find ways to make education more fun and more effective.
At first, I aimed at school itself. While I was still stuck there, I experimented and tried stuff. Whenever we had an assignment that allowed the tiniest smidge of creativity, I took that as a challenge. I aimed to do fun stuff, to seek the boundaries of what teachers would allow, to transform education into something more fun myself.
Admittedly, this meant aiming at pretty random targets at pretty random times. It was a mess. But it taught me how our brains actually learn and it clearly showed me the flaws in our system.
With that knowledge, while at university, I aimed to write my own “better” textbooks (or “tutorials”) and put them online for free. This became Pandaqi Tutorials. I wrote a lot, learned a lot again, made some great stuff and some garbage, but I simply aimed at “write a better explanation for X myself” over and over.
This taught me that text/reading is probably the worst way to learn. You learn by doing. Games are great at showing systems and applying skills in practice. At the very least, some image/video/audio/interactive applet was in order.
With the lessons learned, I could adjust my aim again. I started the Saga of Life, writing stories about historical events and/or the science behind life. By attaching emotion, characters, stakes, and mysteries to the matter I could make it much more fun to learn about. This, again, created lots of good stories and lots of terrible stories, and I learned a lot about how to perfect my aim further.
I had learned so much now that I was able to create a large plan for a complete curriculum of games. Yes, every single topic you might learn in school (and topics that, you know, are actually useful but never taught) put into a simple board game that you actually want to play. My general aim was the same; I could now generate much better ideas much faster.
And now I am far along the creation of my own online store. One that will sell educational content spread across the different categories that I believe make sense (games, quizzes, puzzles, …) I don’t expect it to be a success, or to revolutionize education when it launches, or anything like that. But we’re aiming for it.
Now, please notice that there are no specific goals here. Certainly at the start, when I was ~11 years old, I absolutely didn’t have the goal to start my own webshop. And if I had, it absolutely would not have looked like my current work. I never planned to do any of this, I never expected to do it or for it to succeed, and I never told anyone or wrote down these steps as being “big goals” or “future plans” of mine.
If I had, I probably would have given up after the first attempt. Because none of these attempts were perfect, not even close. None of them earned me enough money to survive for a month or so. For example, I could have said “Pandaqi Tutorials, the best tutorial website ever, is my grand goal!” I could’ve created nice plannings and structures for 6–12 months to reach this. I could’ve put it on my LinkedIn and stoically worked on it every day.
And then, when I lost motivation after ~15 courses, realized my mistakes, and never found a way to earn money … it would have been crushing. I would either have to explain myself and others that I failed, or I would persevere and maybe still be desperately trying to make that tutorial website work. Pandaqi Tutorials would either be some massive reminder of my failure; or I would still be waking up each day, grumpy and beaten down, trying to still reach the planned goals. In other words, my path towards improving education would have probably ended right then and there.
Instead, I aimed for it, took logical steps every day until there were none left, and then I moved my aim to something better.
In hindsight, people love to look at a path like this and be like “wow, Tiamo, you planned this all along? What a master plan to slowly create more and better educational systems for over almost 20 years! Wow!” But it’s not some master plan. It never is. It’s just aiming at something for a while, doing the work, then aiming better with the lessons learned.
The online store is exactly the same. It’s my current aim. With my current knowledge, it is absolutely the best thing I can do—both in terms of quality and potential for survival ( = long-term income). I’ve already made games to teach shapes, quizzes about early language, unique puzzles even 3 year olds can do, an entire new set of fairy tales, etcetera. I believe this has great educational value, will sell, and can completely shift the mind-set on education in the long-term.
But it’s not a hyperspecific goal. There’s no plan with a thousand things to make, and in what order, and a precise date when the store launches. And I don’t expect to reach all those deadlines, revolutionize education and become a millionaire. As this article hopefully showed, they’re not necessary to move forward, and they are even actively harmful for your motivation, creativity and flexibility (for most people).
Having that aim (curriculum of games, profitable online store, etcetera) helps me take the next steps at good pace. I don’t expect to reach it and will not call a failure to reach it … a “failure”.
For all I know, I could launch the store, nobody buys anything, or I massively misjudged the creation of educational content … and I can now take those lessons learned into adjusting my aim.
Conclusion
That’s the best I can do. Don’t have (specific) goals and expect to reach them, which leads to calling yourself a failure if you don’t reach them. Simply have general aims and do your best move every time.
Writing a book? Aim at a masterpiece that your favorite publisher will sell. Don’t bog this down with hyperspecific things your story should include, or do, or be. Don’t expect that masterpiece to happen and preemptively design your life around that expectation of success.
Trying to improve your health? Aim at a great diet and workout schedule. Don’t bog this down with hyperspecific exercises, numbers of repetitions, foods, times, whatever. Don’t expect to become that incredible athlete and drop the aim as soon as this turns out unreachable.
Creating some big project? Aim at the general idea, the “why” of what you’re building. Don’t make this too specific, because actually taking the first step in practice will usually render your carefully laid plans void immediately. Don’t expect the big project to turn out exactly as you envisioned and don’t preemptively decide you’ll get rich (or whatever) or you’ll have failed.
And, as always, if an aim is too vague/large/overwhelming, break it down into smaller aims. I truly believe the ability to break any problem down into smaller, self-contained problems is the number one skill that anyone should have and that should be taught/practiced over and over and over at school. Hey, what a coincidence, that’s exactly what puzzles and games do! Woah!
That’s all for now,
Tiamo