Don't set goals, find your limits

Setting goals feels like action. It gives you the warm sense of progress without the discomfort of change. You can spend hours calibrating, optimizing, refining your goals. You can build a Notion dashboard. You can make a spreadsheet. You can go on a dopamine-fueled productivity binge and still never do anything meaningful.

Because goals are often surrogates for clarity. We set goals when we’re uncertain about what we really want. The goal becomes a placeholder. It acts as a proxy for direction, not a result of it.

Goals have value. And at times it’s worth setting them.

Want to run a marathon? Goals help. But most people will never get there. A million obstacles can get in your way to stop you from putting on that much mileage—the 500 miles of recommended training alone is a lot. There’s so many things in life work to upset the big goal. And if you do meet it, what then? Probably stop running for years.

But constraints open new pathways. Instead of a goal to run 26.2 miles, try running 3x/week, but have fun with it. I run with a good podcast, a good audiobook or music, or alongside a friend. I enjoy it. It’s fun.

Constraints scale better because they don’t assume knowledge. They are adaptive. They respond to feedback. A small team that decides, "We will not hire until we have product-market fit" has created a constraint that guides decisions without locking in a prediction. A founder who says, "I will only build products I can explain to a teenager in 60 seconds" is using a constraint as a filtering mechanism.

Constraints open opportunity. Goals set an ideal future that’s rigid without an ability to easily pivot.

Do you want to be someone, or do you want to do something?

Goals often come from the first desire. Constraints come from the second.

Most days I’m the latter. It’s a more interesting life to live.

Via Westenberg.