This thread is somewhat of a RANT. I think it's interesting conversation, but also something many of us may suffer with and attention should be bought to it.
I was inspired to write this by a book called "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals" By Oliver Burkeman
I found myself nodding my head while digging into the contents of this book.. Not because of some theoretical understanding, but empirical understanding from my own life and it seems the many others who read this book seem to agree with the concept.
What is the concept?
Especially for us here in entrepreneurial circles, it is extremely prevalent that we set goals, plan our days, weeks, months...
Years..
DECADES!
I can't tell you how many pieces of paper I have in my possession in which I spent hours engaged in pen-to-paper planning out exactly how my life was going to roll out.
Then, every time, when finished writing on that little piece of paper, I would have a sense of relief that I finally had "my plan"
Or so I thought...
See, if you're reading this, you probably know what I'm talking about.
"In 5 years this startup company I'm building will be worth X dollars!"
"Within the next year, so and so feature is going to be built out!"
All of a sudden, you get an insight that - as a matter of fact, that feature is useless and it's not needed in your business anymore a week later.
Or, 7 months later you find out that the startup you're working on actually isn't the one that's going to bring you to wealth and prosperity, and now you have to change up all of your "plans" you had for that goal because now you've changed roads and you're in a new business.
You get this sudden feeling of built up anxiety because you wrote that goal down on paper to make that feature something great, and now you feel bad for improperly forecasting your goal.
And now you have no idea where you're going, so you sit down and have another "planning" session for exactly how the next year is going to roll out.
You start feeling like a failure, because everytime you write down a goal, something changes or you get an insight that makes it unnecessary all of a sudden, and you feel guilty, and frustrated.
Or, have you ever read a book and said "OK, this book, and only this one, is my framework for life. I'm going to follow only the guidelines in THIS book for the next 2 years"
What happens?
You find another book that has a similarly good strategy, but is different from the other strategy.
"Welp, gotta change my strategy, THIS book is now the one I follow!"
"Write your 10 goals for this year this way and you'll achieve them" no, no "THIS is how you write your goals to achieve them!" .. "S-M-A-R-T GOALS!"
It's a hamster wheel. It creates anxiety, frustrations trying to forecast your every move.
Am I suggesting that goals are bad?
No, but I am suggesting that goals in which are too specific and too far out into the future, are bad.
Sure, we want to get to the goal of fastlane. But I feel the specifics of that fastlane will likely come through trial and error, not through specific planning. The goal of a scalable business system is a practial, maybe even predictable goal that we can strive for in our lives. The specific contents of that system, not so much.
We see so many gold threads here on the forum of people who made it big, but we may misconstrue their success as something where they carefully took all of the steps correctly because they are "smart & savvy", but we don't see that many of them(or all), in the process, probably had no idea what they were doing or what was bound to come.
The only goal we can really have I feel, is a broad general direction.
Example: We know that in business, we need to make a product and sell it.
If we want to go fastlane, we need to scale it to a lot of people who want it and make sure it's in a controllable system.
What that product is and how that journey will come about? Trying to predict it is unfathomable, and creates a great deal of anxiety.
It feels like it's probably better to instead let go of all that. Let go of trying to be in control of your every move, and just move.
I write this because I'm sick of being stuck in the anxious future due to specific goals that I feel "need" to happen, otherwise I will disappoint myself.
Life sometimes just passes by while you're stuck in your head, constantly isolated trying to plan some specific goal that may change in the snap of a finger.
My question to everybody on here is, what do you think about this? What are your opinions on future forecasting?
I was inspired to write this by a book called "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals" By Oliver Burkeman
I found myself nodding my head while digging into the contents of this book.. Not because of some theoretical understanding, but empirical understanding from my own life and it seems the many others who read this book seem to agree with the concept.
What is the concept?
Especially for us here in entrepreneurial circles, it is extremely prevalent that we set goals, plan our days, weeks, months...
Years..
DECADES!
I can't tell you how many pieces of paper I have in my possession in which I spent hours engaged in pen-to-paper planning out exactly how my life was going to roll out.
Then, every time, when finished writing on that little piece of paper, I would have a sense of relief that I finally had "my plan"
Or so I thought...
See, if you're reading this, you probably know what I'm talking about.
"In 5 years this startup company I'm building will be worth X dollars!"
"Within the next year, so and so feature is going to be built out!"
All of a sudden, you get an insight that - as a matter of fact, that feature is useless and it's not needed in your business anymore a week later.
Or, 7 months later you find out that the startup you're working on actually isn't the one that's going to bring you to wealth and prosperity, and now you have to change up all of your "plans" you had for that goal because now you've changed roads and you're in a new business.
You get this sudden feeling of built up anxiety because you wrote that goal down on paper to make that feature something great, and now you feel bad for improperly forecasting your goal.
And now you have no idea where you're going, so you sit down and have another "planning" session for exactly how the next year is going to roll out.
You start feeling like a failure, because everytime you write down a goal, something changes or you get an insight that makes it unnecessary all of a sudden, and you feel guilty, and frustrated.
Or, have you ever read a book and said "OK, this book, and only this one, is my framework for life. I'm going to follow only the guidelines in THIS book for the next 2 years"
What happens?
You find another book that has a similarly good strategy, but is different from the other strategy.
"Welp, gotta change my strategy, THIS book is now the one I follow!"
"Write your 10 goals for this year this way and you'll achieve them" no, no "THIS is how you write your goals to achieve them!" .. "S-M-A-R-T GOALS!"
It's a hamster wheel. It creates anxiety, frustrations trying to forecast your every move.
Am I suggesting that goals are bad?
No, but I am suggesting that goals in which are too specific and too far out into the future, are bad.
Sure, we want to get to the goal of fastlane. But I feel the specifics of that fastlane will likely come through trial and error, not through specific planning. The goal of a scalable business system is a practial, maybe even predictable goal that we can strive for in our lives. The specific contents of that system, not so much.
We see so many gold threads here on the forum of people who made it big, but we may misconstrue their success as something where they carefully took all of the steps correctly because they are "smart & savvy", but we don't see that many of them(or all), in the process, probably had no idea what they were doing or what was bound to come.
The only goal we can really have I feel, is a broad general direction.
Example: We know that in business, we need to make a product and sell it.
If we want to go fastlane, we need to scale it to a lot of people who want it and make sure it's in a controllable system.
What that product is and how that journey will come about? Trying to predict it is unfathomable, and creates a great deal of anxiety.
It feels like it's probably better to instead let go of all that. Let go of trying to be in control of your every move, and just move.
I write this because I'm sick of being stuck in the anxious future due to specific goals that I feel "need" to happen, otherwise I will disappoint myself.
Life sometimes just passes by while you're stuck in your head, constantly isolated trying to plan some specific goal that may change in the snap of a finger.
My question to everybody on here is, what do you think about this? What are your opinions on future forecasting?
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