(I wrote this essay for myself to figure out what I should be doing.)
So you are here right now. What should you do to achieve your goals?
First, what are your goals? Setting goals is the first step to figuring out what to do because then you know what direction you need to work towards. Even if you don’t set goals, you are, by human nature, still following some, just subconscious ones.[^1]
What are goals? Goals are problems that you want to solve. There are an infinite number of problems in the universe, choose your pick. Are all problems, permitted by the laws of physics, soluble? I don’t know. But I do know that to achieve the most in life, one must have a reasonable level of belief that they are soluble. History has shown that problems labeled impossible have been solved by brave people. Have faith that all problems are soluble.[^2]
After settings goals, you need to prioritize them. Pursuing one goal often comes at the cost of making progress in another goal. To resolve these conflicts, you must prioritize your goals.
Now that you have goals, let’s call actions that take you towards a goal, good, and those that take you away, bad. How do you know if an action is good or bad? It’s difficult because timelines are complex. An event which seemingly hurts you can help you: Hamilton would not have wished for the hurricane on St. Helena, but it led to him writing the letter that got him to the U.S. You miss a flight, you’re sad. The flight crashes, you’re happy. Hence, you can’t fully know whether something is good or bad for your goals because you will never have complete knowledge.[^3] But you can estimate the likeliness.
As an example, suppose you have the choice between taking drugs and not taking drugs. Based on your accumulated knowledge, you guess that not taking drugs is a better action to achieve your goals. Even though there might be this crazy timeline where you get addicted to drugs and then after many years, quit them, get on the grind, work harder, and achieve more than the version of you on the no-drug-taking-timeline. It’s possible, it’s also unlikely based on our best knowledge. Hence no sane person would suggest taking drugs. And that’s essentially what we are trying to do: trying to do the action that is likeliest to make progress towards our goals.
On the flip-side, if you find yourself at the other end of an action such as taking drugs, try to make your timeline match the unlikely yet possible scenario. This is your best move and you can come out better than if you had never done the action in the first place. [^4] “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
To make better guesses, gain more knowledge. The more truth you know about a situation, the more likely you are to choose good actions than bad. This means that gaining knowledge should itself be one of your goals [^5] Curiosity about the world then emerges as one of the most important things because you have to stumble upon important pieces of knowledge because it’s rare to know what knowledge you need beforehand. This is one way to gain knowledge. Another, maybe more common yet detrimental way, is to learn from ones mistakes. I say detrimental because the mistake could have been avoided if you had gained the knowledge in the first place using curiosity. “A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
[^1]: In the modern world, goals that you set yourself are far more likely to lead to well being, rather than chasing subconscious goals.
[^2]: Some heuristics may be used here. If some other person has achieved a goal then it is likely that you can also achieve it. If no other person has achieved a goal but it is allowed within the laws of physics, then you should believe that you can achieve it. This will give you the greatest chance of achieving your goal. You may not, in the end, actually achieve them, but I argue that it is a worthwhile endeavor in one’s life to chase goals that one has set. Whether you achieve them or not is another story. What would you rather be doing? In a sense, there is nothing else that you can do. If you take for granted the fact that you can either chase your consciously set goals or be blindly chasing your unconscious goals – goal-chasing, and thus problem-solving is all that life is.
[^3]: I am not saying that nothing is good or bad for you. I am saying that you can never truly know.
[^4]: The bad action was indeed bad and you should not do it again. So this is not a justification. It’s just a mentality that gives one the best chance to turn bad into good. It is still the case that after a bad action, the likely outcome is bad.
[^5]: As in all things, gaining knowledge can also be over-prioritized — you can gain knowledge about many things that don’t pertain to your other goals and thus have high knowledge but low action.
Inspired by Paul Graham.
Thank you to Harris for giving me feedback on this essay.