PTCC #014:🏝️True ambitions
In the mail 📧
The story 🎒: How to figure out your true ambitions.
Small ideas 💡: On failure, freedom and thoughts.
Stories of the week 📚: A breakdown of my faves.
Web highlights 🌍: Twitter OGs.
Read time: 2 minutes
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THE STORY
I’ll be honest, I’m not one for goals.
Perhaps because I’ve had such a bad relationship with them in the past. Old me would sit for 3 hours straight writing out all the goals I had. Everything from finance to fitness. They would be outlandish. We’re talking about running a marathon by Feb (when I’d never run more than 3 miles in my life) type goals.
After a few stints of dopamine-infused goal-setting, I decided to bin the whole idea.
I was fake-productive. I would write down all these things, spend hours colour-coding, using a ruler to make sure the lines were perfect, and write out in my best handwriting.
It was all fake.
Here’s what I’ve learned about goal-setting:
You know your goals already
You know what you want to do. Of course, you do. You think about it all the time. They keep you up at night, you think about them when you’re driving and you daydream about them when you should be working.
You don’t need a fancy notebook, your best handwriting and highlights to tell you them. You know them.
The problem isn’t goal-setting it’s action
I’ve never heard of someone not hitting their goals because they didn’t write them down. Can you imagine? The Olympic silver medalist is interviewed, she was 3 seconds off the top spot and the interviewer asks her where did it go wrong?
“I didn’t write my goals down at the beginning of this year, that’s why I didn’t get gold.”
Lol, as if.
The problem is action. It’s always action.
But at the root of it all, it’s self-awareness
Yet, there might be a reason for inaction.
Sure it might be fear of failure, ridicule, etc. But sometimes, it might be something lurking a little bit deeper that needs digging into. In some cases, the reason you’re not taking action is that you don’t want to. That it’s not your true ambition.
This happened to me. Climb the corporate ladder I thought. Get a grad job, play the game, and work my way up. Until I got there and realised that wasn’t life for me.
True ambitions are motivated by action
So the question becomes how do you know? How do you know if you are pursuing your true ambition or one that you’ve been mindlessly flowing because Bob at work said it was a good idea?
The answer is this: action builds motivation.
If you do something and love it, like really love it, the act of doing it will motivate you more. That’s true ambition. Conversely, if you take steps in the direction of your goal and you find yourself more demotivated than ever, it’s a sign of fake ambition.
Small ideas:
Pick a game that you want to play forever. Removing the time-horizon allows you to focus on the important bit, enjoying yourself.
Fun is the biggest productivity hack. Full-stop. The end.
Content is a moment in time, the progress of thought develops the progress of content. It’s a never-ending thought loop.
Stories 📚
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