(2020-08-18) Ocean How Are Goals Magic

Malcolm Ocean: How are goals magic? There are lots of other ways to think about goals. Here’s one that I’ve been exploring lately. (goal setting)

Goals are… kind of like ritual magic.

Basically by naming & enumerating the main careabouts I’m moving towards, I create affordances for invoking them as sources of motivation & clarity.

So let’s talk about naming goals.

A goal is a recognizable desired state in the future, that causes you to act differently in the present so as to realize it.

“huh, "InterView” doesn’t really sound like a goal"

Yet I feel super clear internally what it’s about, and have found it really motivating! So the name here is taking on some other role…

Here are some other real goal names I’ve had that are quite evocative:
Habit-hacking (kinda meta & nice alliteration)
Tiger (a fitness goal)
Global Network (twitter, bay area friends etc) Spinal Grace (towardsness re “posture”)
Grok in Fullness (reading, notetaking, BASB, etc)

These goals may have had future targets associated with them, but I’m seeing that they actually also contained a present sense of how I want to relate to those areas of my life.

*why complice.co has “intentions” instead of “to-dos”:

A “to-do” or a “task” is a thing, that supposedly exists external to you. Disconnected. An “intention” is a relationship you have, with your own future. It’s internal, embodied.*

So it seems I’m currently in the process of doing foundation-layer metaphor design for Complice, and realizing that “goal” isn’t an adequate metaphor in the same way that “todo” isn’t.

I think the first thing Complice needs to ask is not “what are your goals?” but “what matters to you?”

When you’re using the goal as a north star while choosing which actions to take today, the goal is less of a “what” and more of a “why”.