[HN Gopher] "Systems vs. Goals" is silly
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"Systems vs. Goals" is silly
Author : luu
Score : 16 points
Date : 2021-09-28 23:27 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (malcolmocean.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (malcolmocean.com)
| roenxi wrote:
| The phrase is still defensible. There is an implicit "focus
| on..." at the front, because it is impossible to live life
| without systems (we form habits automatically, which are
| basically systems) or goals (as the article convincingly argues).
| fungiblecog wrote:
| You have to have goals, but the problem I face is that
| (government) organisations have been told to focus of "outcomes"
| so they spend a vast amount of time talking about trivialities
| (we know what the goals are and we don't need to spend ages
| consulting on them or documenting them in epic detail) and sod
| all time talking about the systems needed to achieve them
| (because that's hard). The results are... predictable...
| [deleted]
| tuatoru wrote:
| In the productivity jargon, first things first.
|
| Which is right. You can't develop _useful_ atomic habits without
| knowing their intended use.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| an attempt to reframe goals to make me feel like i'm missing
| something. nothing new here.
| sime wrote:
| From my understanding, Adams is talking about clearly defined
| outcomes such as "lose 50 pounds" verses targets "get healthier"
| and is suggesting that it's better to have targets and then
| devise systems to get you incrementally closer to the target.
|
| In this vein, there's a good quote from Elon Musk in Everyday
| Astronaut's interview with him at Starbase: "A guided missile is
| going in the wrong direction at any given point in time, but it
| course-corrects.
|
| You don't want to be a super precise cannonball when you don't
| even know where the target is."
| ex3xu wrote:
| (2019)
|
| What a strange post. This guy namedrops Scott Adams and writes a
| few lines referencing Adams' 2013 book _How to Fail At Almost
| Everything And Still Win Big_ , but it's pretty unclear to me if
| he understood the point that Adams was trying to make. In Ch6
| Goals vs Systems, Adams writes:
|
| > _To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That 's literally
| true most of the time... The systems-versus-goals point of view
| is burdened by semantics, of course. You might say every system
| has a goal, however vague. And that would be true to some extent.
| And you could say that everyone who pursues a goal has some sort
| of system to get there, whether it is expressed or not. You could
| word-glue goals and systems together if you chose. All I'm
| suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very
| different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a
| state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent
| failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed
| every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did
| what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the
| feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are
| feeling good every time they apply their system. That's a big
| difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the
| right direction._
|
| Looking at the blog post author's emboldened claim, "Systems
| don't work without goals", and his implication that every olympic
| athlete who does not claim his or her medal emoji is a failure,
| it seems clear to me that he either missed Adams' point entirely
| or has his own agenda with respect to "goals" as a buzzword. I
| will also point out that the project that his blog links to is a
| $10/month subscription service that itself functions as a system
| to help people achieve their goals -- so perhaps this is someone
| who has a vested interest in this semantic battle.
| malcolmocean wrote:
| (author here)
|
| Well detected! Yes, I do have an financial interest in this
| semantic battle. I haven't read Scott Adams' whole book but I
| found myself called to respond to his take when people were
| rejecting my app or my other writing and just citing "goals are
| for losers". So yeah, I'm critiquing a straw man here--Adams'
| thinking is deeper than that, but the people quoting him seemed
| to just have a naive anti-goals slogan.
|
| Even prior to starting the app though, goal-setting had changed
| my life in a really meaningful way, and I would still have
| taken issue with "goals are for losers" as a blanket statement.
| Most people don't realize that it's possible to just decide to
| do something and work towards it, and goal-setting can be a
| really powerful frame for that.
|
| I would say that I'm not the one calling the other Olympic
| athletes losers--Scott Adams does that in his book and I'm
| responding to him. Goals are for everybody.
|
| Anyway, Adams is making some good points (goals and systems are
| different, and presuccess failure is a real issue) but he's
| also overgeneralizing--it is, in fact, possible to have goals
| without having presuccess failure. Goals can feel good at every
| turn. Which I won't go into further here because I made my case
| in the post already.
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