Goals

Conflicting goals will cause a lot of frustration. If one of your goals is to build a successful startup in X years, and another goals of yours is to spend more time with family, those may be opposing goals. Avoid setting yourself up for paradoxical situations like this by avoiding incompatible goals. If you want to get rich, but you also want to spend your time doing something you genuinely love, don't set yourself up for failure by trying to get rich doing something you aren't passionate about. The world is full of conflict and obstacles, don't add to it by having conflicting goals at the individual level. In society there have always been conflicting goals, people want to achieve different things. Same with nature; The cheetah wants to eat medium-sized ungulates, while ungulates just wants to eat grass and other plants. If you're the prey, accept it and adjust to reality; Eat while trying not to get eaten. If you're the hunter, make sure you're faster than the slowest prey. Utopia is a disillusion, we're not all working towards a common goal. We're not all the same, everyone is both prey and hunter. Just as there are external conflicts in the world around us, there will be internal conflicts, perhaps these are just the eternal struggles that we just will have to deal with to the best of our ability.

Aligned goals makes things much more convenient. Adjust objectives so that progress in one domain yields benefit to all of your aims. If one goal is to build your dream business in X years, another aligned goal may be to maximize cognitive function by making smart health choices in diet, exercise and sleep; Your startup will benefit from progress in health-related goals, and having a dream business could be beneficial to cognitive function.

Simplifying goals. Having just one big goal in life will make things simple. The world is complex, but there's no need to make things complicated. Keep things as simple, goals included. Now, your one big goal does not have to be some colossal future vision of immense success. Who knows what the future brings? A major goal could have a timespan of just a few years, or even months. Perhaps even weeks. And you will give everything you've got in the pursuit of this goal. Then, when you've succeeded, or finished, or if you have changed your mind about the goal, you are free to redifine your next goal. Your major goal may have subordinate goals, or milestones. If your major goal is to create the dream business of your life within the next seven years, then you may have a set of supporting goals to assist in making this a reality.

To Be Or Not To Be Goal-Oriented

Being goal-oriented versus something else, like being process-oriented, or having systems or algorithms in life and business. Will you aim for achievement of goals, or have other ways of living? There are no universal best answers. Try different approaches and learn what works best for you.