Yearly Goals are Worthless

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This time last year, I planned goals for the year. Spent a few days on them. It felt good, hopeful.

I accomplished precisely zero of them. Not that it was a bad year — far from it. Just the goals were speculative, things that sounded like they should be easy, rather than things I could actually see a path to solving. And it turned out, things that sound like the should be easy, sometimes aren’t.

Here’s the problem: Problems I know how to solve, get solved in 1-3 months. Problems I don’t know how to solve take 6-60 months. Neither is right for “yearly goals.”

And trying to solve a hard problem in a year is counter-productive — solutions don’t come by banging on the problem over and over, they come from exploring other areas of magick, learning unrelated skills, and eventually, the sum of those unrelated skills offers an insight.

For 2014, I’m dumping yearly goals. Instead, I’ll do monthly goals (problems I know how to solve) and long-term goals (that I’ll return to every so often, after exploring unrelated skills). Next year, I’ll update you on how it worked.

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One Response to “Yearly Goals are Worthless”

  1. Seth Burleigh says:

    I think problem solving is actually a back and forth process. While doing something in another area is actually productive, trusting your intuition is actually more productive. This is because you dont need to consciously understand ideals in order to use them, just like you don’t have to know how to consciously see in order to see.

    I’ve reached this conclusion because I’ve finally, finally done something that I thought was possible, but was actually uber uber hard (i realized this in my times of pessimism). I’ve finally figured out how to analyze the forex markets accurately using a computational technique (time-series bifurcation analysis) that i’ve put together. I did it by trusting my intuition, forged from my unconscious creativity and intuition (thats the way i like to view it). Lol in other words I trusted the statistical correlation powers of my brain, which are describable by words such as ‘this looks better than this because of x,y,z’ where x,y,z probably won’t sound scientific.

    But yes, easy goals are much more fun to accomplish, and easy goals sort of coalesce into the solution for hard goals.

    Therefore, in my opinion, your plan sounds very very useful and 100% logical …

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