Habits, projects, and goals (#28)
Navigating these concepts in my exploratory pursuit
Two fundamental concepts shaped the way I approach my daily schedule. The first is habit. “True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking,” James Clear wrote. I structure my time to do more reading and writing, plus a daily workout and a session of meditation.
When I sit down to work, I focus on “the next and most necessary thing”. This comes from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, where he quoted a letter from Carl Jung. If I’m drawn to a topic, I would spend time reading and writing about it. It usually comes from one of my three main goals (learning, connection, and finding life’s work).
The upside is I’m always engaged in what interests me the most. The downside, as I realized recently, is that I started on too many things.
I try to attribute the problem to my system rather than my weakness. When I follow my curiosity, starting something new almost always feels more exciting than continuing, say, a multi-weeks-long MOOC course.
The problem isn’t really about not finishing things. If something is not worth finishing, it’s better left undone. The problem is that it’s too easy to leave things undone without deliberate reasoning in my system. And I was too quick to pick up a new thing without asking whether it was best for my goals.
It's similar to learning an instrument where my focus is solely on daily practice — they’re hard and should take up most of my time — but consciously deciding on what I should be practicing is also important. Regular feedback from a teacher would also be of great help. Occasional recital opportunities would push me to advance faster.
I designed my system that way to allow exploration and serendipity. I tried to avoid rigid project plans. In fact I hated the word “project” because that smelled bureaucracy (thanks to my past job). I felt my open-ended pursuit was incompatible with the concept of project which was supposed to have have measurable outcomes.
But I’ve realized making plans doesn’t conflict with open-ended work because plans can be short-term. Outcomes don’t have to be measured quantitatively either. I could reflect, for example, whether doing this project or experiment gets me closer to my goals. A project can also be time-oriented rather than result-oriented. When I clearly define these projects, it becomes easier to see if I’m taking on too much at once and how well I’ve been doing them.
This is another learning and unlearning for me. It’s not important if something is called a habit or a project. What matters is the problem at hand and how we go about solving it.
On this Week
💡Satisfaction and progress in open-ended work
I often revisit this Andy Matuschak’s post, where he shared his approach of combining “butt-in-chair” action-oriented goals with regular reflections on achievement-oriented goals.
I also found Scott Young’s thinking on habits vs projects helpful:
Habits are plenty for some goals, but others will need projects. I might set a goal of exercising daily—if I stick to it for long enough, it can eventually become an automatic behavior. But if I decide to run a marathon for the first time, it will likely require more than just my daily jog. If I want to win the marathon, I will need a lot more than just a habit.
📜 Karl Popper’s three worlds
Popper’s definition of three worlds is super interesting:
World 1 is the physical world
World 2 our conscious experience
World 3 contains our theories and guesses, including genetic code. It’s this “World 3” that he defines as “objective knowledge.”
In Objective Knowledge, he contrasts different modes of error correction and highlights the value of the scientific method:
I see in science one of the greatest creations of the human mind… a comparable to the emergence of descriptive and argumentative language, or to the invention of writing…
… Language allows the creation and mutation of explanatory myths, and this is further helped by written language. But it is only science which replaces the elimination of error in the violent struggle for life by non-violent rational criticism, and which allows us to replace killing (world 1) and intimidation (world 2) by the impersonal arguments of world 3.
🎁 A lesson in possibility
Always inspired by Benjamin Zander’s masterclass, I was excited to watch his new TED talk: Life Lessons from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. This brings to mind a quote from his book The Art of Possibility (which I plan to reread):
Let us suppose, now, that a universe of possibility stretches beyond the world of measurement to include all worlds: infinite, generative, and abundant. Unimpeded on a daily basis by the concern for survival, free from the generalized assumption of scarcity, a person stands in the great space of possibility in a posture of openness, with an unfettered imagination for what can be.
（Which also reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once.)
I hope you find this helpful! I’d be thrilled to hear your thoughts or questions, or say hi on X.
Until next week,
Weichen
Thumbnail photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash