Growth Without Goals | Editorials

Why Work Without Goals?

For many years I was fixated on goals, but at the same time was also simplifying my work life and working on being more content. I realized two things:

1. Goals (wanting to improve) are not consistent with contentment (being happy with where you are).


2. Goals are not necessarily necessary (I thought they were for a long time, but t

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Maybe Scott Adams said it best:

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly con

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The same idea applies to investing. The continuous goal, in my case, is a portfolio that has distinct advantages versus the market along dimensions like value, momentum, capital allocation, etc. There are no price targets, no return targets, no staking my results on a given outcome for a given company. A goalless process like this is incredibly ha

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I know this is controversial talk and antithetical to the success mantras of the metric obsessed, performative, materialistic, linear, Key Performance Indicator driven world we live in, but someone needs to play the role of the annoying child who questions lazily adhered to and potentially harmful conventions, if only to stress-test them. I mean, w... See more

I wish when I was at my previous startups I had focused more on building and less on winning. Sure, I may not have done exactly what I had thought I wanted, but finding ways to love the process would’ve allowed for better outcomes anyway. What we want is such an abstract idea, built on a foundation of shifting sand, that it is pointless to try to p... See more

Everyone I know is scheming for the future. They’ve got big goals and get up every day and work like mad to try to achieve them. I’ve always found something odd about that: Despite all this effort, people don’t seem to think too much about the specifics of what would happen after their goal is achieved.