I don’t think I’ve ever had a real goal.
Looking back, I guess it was always a goal to be a software engineer. But I think when I talk about goals, I’m talking about something super concrete, where you say you want to achieve a certain thing by a certain time. And even the goal of being an engineer was not that concrete, I just assumed I would get there when the time was right, and I think it worked out fine.
I think talking to my managers at work have made me more conscious about having goals. They said very similar things, about having a concrete image in your mind as to where you want to be in this many years, and then reverse engineering a plan as to how to get there.
I think so far, I’ve been okay with not having to set goals like this. And I think it’s because I was operating under very specific rules, that I believed would give me the most satisfaction in life.
A little while ago, I finished reading a book called The Confidence Gap, which I read as an introduction to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I had always been curious about the different schools of therapy, and this one was pretty different from the ones I was familiar with. I think the biggest thing that resonated with me about the book and the philosophy in general was the idea of living by one’s values. It was something I’d heard so many times before, but had no real idea what it meant.
Living by one’s values ended up being a topic much more simple than I thought it would be. The book gives you a full list of I think 70 or so values, and it basically asks you which ones you feel are the most important in your life, that you want to live your life full of, that you want to represent everyday you’re alive.
I found out that my top values were:
- Beauty
- Independence
- Skillfulness
- Self-development
- Persistence
- Caring
- Freedom
I was surprised that some values, like Beauty, I had been completely unaware of and had made no time for it at all. Other values, like Skillfulness and Self-development, I had been practicing unconsciously. When I was able to spell it out for myself what mattered to me the most, I was able to consciously make time for them.
The way I made time for it though, wasn’t anything grand or time-consuming. I just told myself that if I can practice these values everyday, that would lead to me having a more fulfilling life. At least that’s what it said in the book. And I decided to believe it.
I think that’s the biggest way the book shifted the way I think. The book mentions the concept of two distinct things: goals and values. Goals, the book said, are when you want to do a certain X by a certain deadline Y. For example, Bob wants to run a full marathon before he turns 30. Values, though, are what you can practice everyday. There’s no end. For example, Bob decides to run everyday, to practice his value of fitness. And I’m not sure if this is what the author wanted to say, but to me the message was: you can live a personally meaningful life by committing to a life where you strive to practice your values as much as possible. And to me, as a more extreme message, it meant: I don’t need to set goals in order to live a meaningful life.
I remember feeling that that was a very revolutionary perspective for me. I always had this idea that I needed goals, and more specifically achievements, in order to live a purposeful life, or at least tell myself that I do. So being able to distance myself from this idea felt very freeing. Reading books like The Burnout Society also helped me gain a new perspective that what might be called “hustle culture” could actually be exploitation disguised as freedom and self-actualization. But I’m not here to really argue about that… the point was that I felt I had found a new philosophy that could help guide me to live a life that better suited what I wanted.
But recently, I’ve started to appreciate the idea of goals. And I think there are two reasons:
- I found myself juggling too many values (things I wanted to do), and wanted a way to prioritize my efforts; and
- I’m starting to understand I don’t have forever. (What a sad way to put it, not really what I meant… maybe a more positive (and maybe more accurate!) way of putting it would be, that there are things I know I want to do sooner than later, and I want to get started quickly!)
I wrote two reasons, but when I think about it it’s just about time. If I had all the time in the world, I probably wouldn’t have to prioritize, and what I want to get done will eventually be done. But with how fast the weeks and months are going by lately, I’m probably going to need a more concentrated effort to really do things I want to do.
Regarding the first reason, I think that’s also interesting too. When I first read the book, got in touch with my values and started doing things I thought I would enjoy, I started off pretty small. Maybe just studying a little French everyday, reading novels. But I got better and better at identifying what I enjoy doing, and then all of a sudden there was so much to choose from. Right now I can think of topics like networking and lower level computer science that I fairly recently got into, I’m also working on a bit of an actual coding project, French, reading of course… but with my full time job and trying to protect my personal time as well, I realized I’d have to be a lot more meticulous about how to allocate the time I have.
So yeah, just a very long post to say that I will be trying to budget my time a lot better. Probably something people learn in college, look at me, learning the value of time management when I’m almost 30. I’ve yet to really get started on this goal planning stuff, but just like most other things I’ve tried to learn,I’m going to try a bunch of things and see what sticks.