What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting

Activities with ameliorative value are those that prevent something bad from happening or occur in response to something bad happening.

Positive thinking can't make up for a lack of capacity.

When I'm truly engaging those critical thinking skills, I'm much less likely to blame myself for failure. I'm less likely to fixate on my own shortcomings and how to overcome them. Critical thinking created a more satisfying life for me than positive thinking ever could.

Growth, change, creating cool stuff—it

health precarity, interpersonal precarity, home and housing precarity, and other forms of uncertainty and instability. Precarity isn't a personal failing—although it's often perceived as such.

Practice is resistance. It reduces urgency, creates satisfaction, and reminds you that there is more to life than being productive.

so many systems for planning and goal-setting assume the user works a salaried desk job five days a week, with paid time off and fully funded healthcare,

difficulty with executive functioning. But no amount of deadlines, flashing red notifications, or threats of being held “accountable” are going to matter if you haven't bought into the purpose of the work they remind you to do.

goals become a sort of technology for self-erasure. We learn to recognize all the ways we don't fit in and the rungs we haven't yet climbed and define our future selves against those traits. We rarely—if ever—stop to think whether the things we're not are actually a core part of who we are. And that's not just a personal problem. It ripples out int