Directions

Rethinking goals and New Years resolutions

Dec 25, 2023

I spent a lot of my teens and early 20s in spaces1 where we talked about SMART2 goals. I was fairly cynical of the short-lived changes New Years resolutions held, but well structured goals seemed like a perfect solution to actually getting the things that you wanted to do done. So in early 2018, after attending RYLA3, a 5 day residential leadership course that kicked me out of the cruise control I’d been living on, I quickly set to setting up goals for the upcoming year.

Almost immediately I ran into a problem.

A lot of what I wanted to do, wasn’t about getting one thing done. It was about something more long term. I wanted to build ongoing habits that would last me a lifetime, I wanted to make better life choices4 in nuanced situations rather than be bound to an arbitrary pass/fail goal. I wanted a framework that wasn’t about achieving a milestone, but about moving towards something, something that I would never actually get to. I wanted Directions.

Directions

If goals are a tool that asks you what you want to do, Directions5 are a tool that asks you who you want to Be. What is important to you? What do you value most?

Once you know your Directions you can use them to guide your choices. They’re not a destination in-of themselves, but they can point you down a pathway.

Let’s say you’re deciding whether to take a well paying job that would involve moving away from your home city. The Direction of Financial Stability would point you down the “take the job” pathway while the Direction of Community would say “stay with your people”.

So how do you find your Directions?

You can just start from a blank slate. Think about what’s important to you, what you prioritise the highest, and then think of words that represent each of those ideas.

Or, if you’re like me, and prefer to prune rather than grow ideas, you can instead start with a list of values (there’s plenty to choose from).

One method is to start by listing6 all the words that apply to you, then trim your list down to a top 10, and finally a top 5 or top 3.

Whatever your method I recommend aiming for a no more than 5 Directions by the time you’re done. Any more and they won’t be as helpful for making decisions down the line.

At its best this isn’t just a set and forget exercise. I’d suggest you think about when you’ll re-assess your list. It took me several iterations to land on the more stable set of Directions I’ve been using for the last few years.

When Directions clash

Most of the time your Directions will be in line with each other, they’re all aspects of the broader question of “Who do you want to be?” after all. Sometimes though, they will point you down entirely different pathways.

What if, in the example above, you have Directions of both Financial Stability and Community. How do you decide between two things that are both deeply important to you?

There’s no silver bullets here. Sometimes choices are hard. One decision making tool I use is to unpack the trade-offs: To list out all the expected outcomes of the decision, and after doing that, to score each option from 1-10 against each of your Directions.

To be clear I don’t suggest you should then unthinkingly do what the numbers tell you. My recommended strategy is to do the analysis and after crunching the numbers go with your gut.

Related Recommendations

CGP Grey’s video Your Theme7 does a fantastic job of introducing and explaining the Who to Be rather than a What to Do concept8. For a while, when getting frustrated with the framing of this post, I was tempted to just embed this video at the top and talk around it.

Wondering how to stay in touch with your Directions, so they’re not just another thing in a text doc that you never think about? Well ~~in lieu of my forthcoming post on mnestics and my morning routine~~ (Update: I wrote about remembering the important things here) I strongly recommend Jarred Filmer’s post on Mnestics and putting in place a system to remember.9

In his Replacing Guilt series Nate Soares talks about unpacking decisions in the context of “should”. If you’re worried about trade-offs, or find yourself doing things because you “should”, I’d recommend giving it a read.