Mini Blog Post 16: Prioritisation Part 1/2 - Finding Goals
(This was a slightly too ambitious post to write in one day, so I’ve split it into two halves. This half motivates prioritisation + discusses finding goals, tomorrow’s will discuss how to act towards your goals)
Introduction
One of the most important life skills you can ever learn is how to prioritise things well. We all have limited time, and energy, and resources. And life is a continuous process of spending resources to achieve my goals. And figuring out how to spend resources to best achieve your goals is incredibly key to the outcome.
Yet this is very obviously something that 99.9% of people suck at (including me!). And this makes sense - prioritisation is hard and you will never be perfect at it. And it’s easy to fall into traps like always prioritising, being constantly paralysed with indecision, and never really doing anything. But I think that the value of prioritising the right amount is incredibly high, especially compared to not prioritising at all, and thus worth striving for.
This is a difficult post to write, because I am far from an expert at prioritisation. And there’s a wide spectrum of how people struggle to prioritise - a lot of people have blind spots at the need to prioritise at all, while some people agonise far too much about prioritisation, and the resulting paralysis holds them back from achieving anything at all. In this post, I am going to attempt to outline why you should care about prioritisation, some thoughts on finding the goals to prioritise, a brain dump of advice on how to actually implement it, and common mistakes I think people make at either end of this spectrum.
Why you should prioritise prioritisation
Prioritisation is one of the most important things you can ever do. The world is complicated. It’s follow of opportunities, and traps. Beautiful things that can add a ton of value to your life, and unimportant rabbit holes you can fall down, and which hold you back from achieving what you could. And because the world is so complicated, the actions we can take have big differences in their pay-offs. Different actions can easily have massive differences in their outputs. I know that the best charities can do tens to hundreds of time more good than average charities. I know that some projects will fill me with excitement, while others feel like a drag. I know that some people spark joy in my life, while others do not. And our intuitions are not a good guide to this, because we evolved in a far simpler world. But our intuitions live in our minds, while our goals live in the world, and you should not let this hold you back.
And prioritisation is hard to take seriously. It’s big, and fuzzy, and abstract, and triggers so many well-known biases. It’s really easy to fail to be deliberate and track how your actions help you, and easy to fall into doing what everybody around you does. It’s difficult to keep track of the alternatives and how much better they could be, they are vague and abstract while your current actions are concrete. There’s a strong attachment to the default action. If nobody around you takes prioritisation seriously, it doesn’t feel urgent. Humans focus on the short-term, and neglect the long-term, and it’s easy to fall into spirals of constant busy-work - mindless problem sheets, boring emails, toxic friendships, a web of unwanted obligations - and to realise that in the last month you spent practically no time working towards your high level goals. It’s hard to have an intuition for the value of information, that spending a while thinking and exploring could genuinely help you, and instead to think you already know best.
And these are just some of the many biases at play here. The point of that long list is that failure to prioritise shouldn’t be surprising, and shouldn’t feel like a personal failure. Failure to prioritise is the default state of the human experience. You need to constantly fight against the entropy pushing you towards failing to act towards your goals. Our default settings do not think about prioritisation, and this is something you will need to try hard to change.
Further, it’s easy to think that prioritisation should only apply to certain kinds of goals, like your work. Things that are directly tangible and quantifiable, something explicitly focused on real-world results. But just as you can optimise for any goal, all goals need prioritisation! If my goal is to feel happy and fulfilled, then I should prioritise finding good friendships and relationships, removing stress from my life, and ensuring I have good sleep and rest. And it’s easy to fail to take actions that move me towards this.
Understanding goals
A really key component of prioritisation is knowing what your goals are. This is the factor that should most determine which actions you take. For example, in my degree it feels much more salient to me to optimise how hard I’m working - how much I focus, how much time I spend - than it does to optimise how I’m working - which courses I do, whether I bother doing the problem sheet at all, the mindset with which I approach the course. How hard I’m working feels very tangible, I have control over it, it’s much easier to quantify and to fit into the role of being a good student. But it just doesn’t make that big a difference. At the end of the day, I’ve still done the sheets, I’ve still learned something from them. I might do them to a slightly higher standard, or have a bit more time left over, but the amount of efficiency I can squeeze out by “just trying harder” just isn’t that high. But my goals are not “do my sheets as efficiently as possible”. If my goal is to learn the content as well as possible, some questions are a complete waste of my time! If my goal is to impress my supervisor so they write a good reference, I should focus on conceptual clarity and good write-ups! If I want to have fun, I should choose the courses I think I’ll most enjoy! If I want to gain the meta-skills of thinking like a mathematician, I should dive down rabbit holes of the hardest courses and seek to understand what’s actually going on! If I want to learn directly useful skills, I should choose stats courses! And maybe doing sheets efficiently helps me with these, but it’s rarely the most effective path. And understanding my true goals massively informs how I should be acting.
And finding your goals is hard! Especially if you’re younger, it can be difficult to know what your goals should be, and so give up on prioritising. Or, you could commit the mistake of thinking you know what your goals are, and optimising really hard for the proxy goal, and not realising what you’re missing. I think this is the key mistake behind somebody who takes a prestigious but soulless and unpleasant corporate job, like investment banking, and ultimately ends up not enjoying life. But, though hard, I think this is a really important problem, and one you can make progress on.
Terminal Goals
It’s useful to think about which kinds of goals you have. There are terminal, or intrinsic, goals - high-level goals I value for their own sake. Common examples:
Making the world a better place
Adding to the body of human knowledge
Feeling happy and fulfilled
Starting a family
The happiness of loved ones
Safety and stability
Having a legacy
For me, my strongest terminal goals are to feel happy and fulfilled, and to make the world a better place (note - there’s an important distinction between making the world a better place in order to feel happy, and as an intrinsic goal). But this is extremely personal and subjective. I find this is the kind of thing you really just need to introspect on, and examine what you truly value. But I find that most people normally have some idea of what these are. A useful tool for exploring this.
A good hack: humans are very short-term focused, and it’s easy to focus too much on the present. But terminal goals are for the long-term. I find it helpful to picture myself in 5 years, or 20 years, and ask what I’d want from my life then. This abstracts out from the short-term concerns, and is a good way to filter for what I really care about.
A warning: A super common mistake is to take your terminal goals from social cues, and your culture. This rarely works. Your terminal goals may align with your culture, but they may not. A terminal goal should feel visceral. It should be something you genuinely care about, and something you would fight for. Something where your life would feel like it is missing something if you don’t have it. I think people often, say, feel like they should want a family because their parents or culture expect it of them, or that they need to focus on prestige or making money because it’s the “done thing”. No, no, a thousand times no! If you want these for their own sake, then that’s awesome! But do not let your terminal goals be dictated to you. These are the things you will spend your life working towards. And if you take on the wrong goal, because that’s what your culture tells you to do, you’ve already lost.
Instrumental goals
If you can take actions that obviously and directly work towards your terminal goals, that’s amazing! But this is hard, because the world is complex. Which brings me to the second category: instrumental goals. These are things I care about, because they bring me closer to my terminal goals, rather than as a value in and of themselves. This is an important concept, because the world is complicated. It’s difficult to know how to directly achieve your terminal goals, and our intuitions suck at this. Instrumental goals are a key mental shortcut to actually make progress on this.
It’s key to know the difference, because I only want to do an instrumental goal if it achieves my terminal goal. So I need to know whether it achieves my terminal goals. Much of the failures of people to be deliberate ultimately stem from this - it’s easy to absorb an instrumental goal from social norms and culture, and to think it brings you closer to your terminal goals, but fail.
Common examples:
Earning money
Having a prestigious degree
Prepping for job interviews
Cramming for exams
Meeting new people
Joining a society
In practice, you want to understand your terminal goals and use them to find your instrumental goals, and keep your instrumental goals grounded. And then in day-to-day life, you want to mostly just think about your instrumental goals. These can get very specific and nested! For example, maybe my terminal goal is to have a family. I can achieve this by getting a high-paying career as a software engineer at Google. I can achieve this by developing a good portfolio of coding projects. I can achieve this by becoming motivated to work on a coding project. I can achieve this by having friends who are really pumped about coding things. I can achieve this by going to a local hackers society, and trying to make friends. We’re now 6 layers deep, but this could genuinely be a good way to achieve your goals! And you can’t go through this process for every action, you need to cache your goals as specific, instrumental goals to make any progress.
But it’s easy for this grounding to get lost! Maybe I just wouldn’t cut it as a software engineer. Maybe Google wouldn’t be impressed with my portfolio, and instead I should prep for coding interviews. Maybe I should first be working on my coding skills. It’s important to take regular time to reflect on whether you’re actually making progress towards your terminal goals (or even your higher instrumental goals!), to check that this delicate balance isn’t broken.
How to Find Goals
It’s all well and good to talk about how important goals are, and how to categorise them. And I think conceptual clarity is an important step to getting started. But it’s easy to feel paralysed, and for this to not feel actionable. So how can you make progress?
Back-Chaining
A super useful technique for converting terminal goals to instrumental goals is back-chaining. You start with the terminal goal, an idea of where you want to be in, say, 5 years. And then you try to think about what would be necessary for achieving this. What would be the best high level steps that get you closer to this? The highest level of instrumental goals. What would be the things that get you closer to that? Etc.
Back-chaining can be a good starting point if finding terminal goals is easier for you than finding good instrumental goals (it is for me!). And it’s a very valuable tool for ensuring that you’re deliberate and purposeful about achieving your goals. By having a clear chain of cause and effect, it’s much easier to remain grounded, and to notice when you stop being grounded.
This is hard, and takes time and effort, but can be extremely valuable. It helps to structure it as a nested tree of bullet points - begin with the terminal goal, the sub-bullets are high-level instrumental goals, sub-sub-bullets are instrumental goals for those, etc.
For example:
Terminal goal: Have a family
Find a stable, loving relationship
Understand what I want in a partner
Gain experience
Introspect on this
Ask friends for their thoughts
Be in a relationship
Put myself in situations where I meet a lot of single people
Go outside more!
Develop the confidence to initiate things
Be desirable myself
Work on my communication skills
Develop interests
Develop my social skills
Develop empathy
Have the time to devote to a relationship
Find a job with a good work/life balance
Be able to support a family
Have money
Find a well-paying job
Be in good health - if I have a health problem
Exercise regularly
Sleep well
Eat healthily
Alt: Find a high-earning partner
Raise awesome kids
Find a partner who’d be good at this
Figure out how ???
Have a job which lets me take time for this
Get them a good education
Live in an area with good schools
Pointless to think about right now
This is not a terminal goal of mine, and so I haven’t spent too much time fleshing out this example. But hopefully that gave a better idea of the purpose of this! There’s a lot of uncertainty, different options, ambiguity about how to break things down. There’s some empirical uncertainty, there are instrumental goals I know I have, but where I’m not sure how to act upon. But this is a key first step to truly being deliberate, and having direction. And it can turn a terminal goal from something terrifying, complex and aversive into something more manageable! If you know the steps you’re confused about, you can start to solve this, by doing research, running experiments, asking for advice, etc.
The meta point is that it’s easy to be paralysed by uncertainty, and by big, open-ended tasks. Finding ways to make progress, make things concrete, is key to actually taking the first step. I call this getting surface area on the problem - learning, exploring, and ultimately understanding it better. This won’t be perfect, and will require further effort and iteration. But it’s a lot better than doing nothing.
Iterative Brainstorming
Another problem is that it can feel overwhelming to try to write out your entire life priorities. This is a big question! This is complex, and difficult, and my exact view on it will vary day to day. These are all valid concerns, and another source of paralysing uncertainty.
One solution to paralysing uncertainty, is to reframe the question. You aren’t trying to perfectly understand your goals, you’re just trying to make progress.
Iterative brainstorming is an approach to this, where the goal is to regularly spend time thinking through high-level goals. And each time, you read over what you had before, and iterate. Edit a few bits that seem off, add something you missed last time, etc. In practice, you might spend Sunday morning once a week trying to do back-chaining, and checking whether you’re living your life in accordance with your goals. And in this time, you aren’t trying to perfectly understand your goals. You’re going to be coming back to this again and again, reading through what you put last time, changing it, etc. So it doesn’t matter if it’s perfect. You’re just making a habit of regular reflection and slow, incremental progress. And ultimately, life is a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t need to perfectly understand your goals now, and finding goals is an iterative, incremental process. This just makes that a bit more explicit.
Value of Information
One of the hardest parts of these approaches is sometimes you just feel confused. You don’t know enough to be able to meaningfully make progress on finding goals. This is super common with, say, careers - if you’re early in your life and you can’t just sit down and think for a while, and end up fully convinced you know exactly what career is right for you. If you think you can, you’re almost certainly being wildly overconfident! “Which career is best for me” is a question about the world, and “which career do I think is best for me” is a fact about your mind - by default these are not the same thing.
The solution to this is to have uncertainty about your goals. It’s reasonable to have some confidence in your terminal goals, but instrumental goals are pretty specific, and there are many paths to the same end goal. And maybe you’re mistaken about your terminal goals!
But this isn’t a deal-breaker for the concept of having goals. If you’re uncertain about your long-term goals, this is the thing you should be prioritising! Your number one priority should be to explore, to gain information, and to become less uncertain.
In practice, there are a few ways to do this:
Actually try things! Work on projects, do internships, have new experiences, etc. Your goals are grounded in the real world, so you need data and experience to better calibrate yourself
Often, you want to “commit” to a particular chain of instrumental goals, and pursue those, but keep an eye out for the idea that this is not the best path.
The world is uncertain, and you can never have true certainty about the best path to your goals, so you need to balance between keeping your options open and actually doing things - this is a difficult balance and there’s no magic formula to it
Ask people for advice! There is skill to doing this well, people are different, and it’s not enough to just understand their preferences. I try to understand their underlying models, and why they say what they do
Do your homework - research your options!
And you should definitely prioritise how you gather information! You can never be perfectly certain, and need to focus your efforts. Back-chaining can be useful for this - it can help identify what things you’re most confused about, with regards to how it achieves your terminal goals.
For something like careers, it can often help to imagine a concrete hypothetical world. If, say, I’m doing a consulting internship, imagine that I’ve worked as a consultant for 5 years, and I feel dissatisfied with life. Then, work backwards and try to explain why this went wrong. The reasons this generates will be key uncertainties, and should be things you should explore most!
Keeping your options open
An alternate solution to uncertainty is to seek robust goals - your terminal goals exist, but you have uncertainty about them, and you want to be working towards most of your plausible goals. A robust approach is to look for convergent instrumental goals - goals that are robustly useful, for almost all plausible terminal goals. Things that get you information, skills, resources. Things that give you options, which you could later leverage when you better understand what you want. These might not be perfect - there could be worlds where this wastes some time, but they should be useful in most worlds.
Common examples:
Gaining employable skills (learning how to program, data science/ML, learning stats, good communication skills, good writing skills)
Learning new things
Note - for some people this is a terminal goal, for others it’s purely instrumental - it’s worth looking for the difference!
Finding a stable, loving romantic relationship
Exercising regularly
Eating healthily
Working on your mental health
Having a good social network
Building good meta-skills - being reflective, good at introspecting, good at fixing problems in your life
Being good at prioritisation!
Conclusion
Goals are really important. They’re confusing, and difficult, and impossible to get perfectly right. But I think this is one of the most important things you can ever think about. But I think for many of us, it never feels like a priority. Or, you feel helpless, and don’t feel like you really can make progress by thinking about your goals. I recently realised, when thinking about how confused I was about my goals, and how paralysing this was, that I’d never actually done the obvious thing and blocked out time to think about them. Even though this is approximately the most important thing I could possibly be figuring out, and will significantly shape my life’s direction. And that this was embarrassingly inconsistent.
So, since I currently have a surplus of free time, I’m currently allocating an afternoon a week to just zooming out, and thinking about this stuff! Introspecting on my terminal goals, and back-chaining to find my instrumental goals. And I’m doing the Complice Goal-Crafting Intensive this Sunday, which also seems helpful towards actually exploring this! (Disclosure: I get a small referral bonus if you sign up via that link. And as of the time of writing, there’s 1 slot remaining in European time zones)
If you feel similarly confused, I strongly urge you to actually spend time thinking about this stuff. The default state of the world is that you will not prioritise, because this is hard, and we all suck at it. And it’s easy to encounter these ideas, think that it’s important, and feel guilty about it. Maybe feel a burst of motivation, and like you’ll definitely get round to it some day! This is pressing the Try Harder button. If the ideas in this post resonated with you, and you want to think more about your high-level goals, think about what action you can take right now to ensure that your future self actually thinks about this stuff. Pick a specific time when you’ll be free, and put a block on your calendar.
(Part 2 on how to act upon goals is coming tomorrow!)
