The Goal Artistry Primer
Events for the week of October 25-31:
Part Moon, Part Traveling Salesman: On the Enduring Relevance of Ivan Illich w/ David Cayley. October 25th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Origins of the Self: An Integrated Model w/ Bonnitta Roy. October 27th @ 12:00 PM ET. Beyond Self-Discipline and The Pop-Up School event. 90 mins.
Practicing Compassionate Self-Inquiry w/ Susan Campbell. October 28th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Events at the wisdom gym:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Tuesday @ 3:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
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October 24th, 2021
I wrote about “digital gangs” yesterday. This is what we were calling the philosophical fellowship/mastermind groups for Beyond Self-Discipline (BSDv0) to trojan horse friendships of virtue into our culture. To unpack this phrase further…
The word “digital” in digital gangs is obvious - we are meeting and cohering on the internet by using various online tools such as Telegram, Notion, and Jitsi Meet. The word “gangs” caused some confusion with the BSDv0 cohort. Why juxtapose a word with negative connotations like gangs with an old fogey word like virtue? Looking into the etymology of the word “gang” might disabuse people of their confusion:
A going, journey, way, passage.
The word “gangway” is also cool, defined as: temporary passageway. BSD is meant to be a gangway towards something new. A new you, a new us, a new way to be with the world, hopefully alchemically creating a new world.
I will be live journaling for the duration of BSDv0, philosophically musing about the various aspects of this offering. One aspect is developing a goal literacy or what we are referring to as a “goal artistry.” I am realizing that there is an artistry to the goal process and I sense that approaching goals as an art form will help us get into the right relationship with our goals.
Most people are not in the right relationship with their goals, mainly because the popular literature on goals has so much bullshit. Most of it comes from either self-help or business books, hence oriented towards things like Game A and Total Work.
Goals need to be seen in a new light and I am hoping this entry will provide that. I am going to be using this entry as a primer for goal artistry. This will be serving as a rough draft that could be incorporated as pre-reading for future iterations of BSD. This will probably be a long entry so I’ll add headers for easier reading. I will be introducing everything I know about goal artistry here.
For whatever reason, the goals process has been made synonymous with “goal setting.” The self-help literature, especially the corny stuff from the 1980s and 1990s, is partly responsible for this. The focus there was on setting goals and then engaging in positive thinking about achieving them. Both are important of course, but ultimately do not work for most. They are also guided by philosophies that are not in service to creating a new world.
The goal setting process is really important though, as it is the first step, so I’ll start there...
Goal Setting 101
I read a lot about goals and the academic literature has an abundance of good stuff here; Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham are key contributors to the literature. In their paper, “A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance,” they list five principles for goal setting: clarity, challenge, commitment, feedback, and task complexity.
I’ll unpack each, referencing how we are approaching them in the BSD process...
Clarity. Ensure your goals are clear. This is where that famous SMART goal framework comes in. SMART here means “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based.” I am not so dogmatic about this, as I think having SMAR goals could be good, or a SMART goal with the “T” meaning “Timeless.” The biggest challenge with people beginning the goal artistry process is that they set really vague goals. Having the end in mind is important for a lot of goals. This is what researchers call the “goal state.”
Challenge. The goal has to be challenging. If it was not challenging, it does not need to be a goal. Most people do not need to set a goal to watch the latest Netflix show while eating a pizza. It cannot be too challenging though, as that will be demotivating. This is why we recommend people reflect on their “credence level” (strength of belief in their ability to complete the goal, in a percentage) after writing out their SMART goals. If the percentage is 100%, you might not need this as a goal. If the percentage is well below 60%, the goal might be too difficult. Something that hovers around the 70-90% credence range seems to be the sweet spot.
Commitment. There needs to be a wholehearted “heaven yeah” towards pursuing goals, not achieving them, as this is Stoically out of one’s control. There has to be some kind of locking-in energy, that says: okay, fuck, I am doing this. Let’s see what happens. Researchers talk about “goal valence” - Shaul Fox and Michael Hoffman describe this as the “attractiveness or desirability of the goal.” Goals that have high goal valence make the commitment feel more aligned.
Feedback. One needs feedback, both qualitative and quantitative. The Quantified Self Movement will have interesting things to say about the latter, but this could be something as simple as having a clear success/fail metric. The challenge is that this often triggers a “shame spiral” in people if they fall on the fail side. This is why we want to incorporate wisdom from A.J. Bond’s shame literacy to untether the outcome of one’s goal pursuit from one’s self-worth. It is not reasonable to think of oneself as a failure because one failed at a goal, but it is understandable that one can feel like one is. It is wise to not operate in a way where this feeling becomes stuck. It is equally unwise to judge oneself for feeling this way. It is all such a delicious thing to navigate, and hopefully BSD becomes very sophisticated in imbedding shame-ameliorating techniques in the process.
Task complexity. This one is about keeping it simple. Yes, one can pursue complex things, but it is often good to set bite-sized goals for many areas and get some small wins in, so a wise momentum manifests. B.J. Fogg’s “Tiny Habits” methodology encourages this approach.
Having these principles are wonderful, but to have goal artistry requires more than just setting a goal.
The Goal Artistry Process
The term that academics use for what follows the goal setting process is “goal pursuit.” In the paper “Implementation Intentions and Effective Goal Pursuit,” researchers Peter M. Gollwitzer and Veronika Brandstätter list four phases to the goal pursuit process: predecisional (desiring), preactional (committing), actional (doing), and postactional (evaluating).
There is a higher-order category beyond goal setting and goal pursuit, one I will call the “goal artistry process.” I see at least eight facets to this process: goal setting, goal priming, goal pursuit, goal shielding, goal adjustments, goal attainment, goal accountability, and goal beautification.
I’ll unpack each facet in detail below...
Goal setting. This basically boils down to writing your goals down. There is a real power to just writing them down. The five principles from Locke and Latham mentioned above, along with the various associated tactics (SMART goals, credence level, Quantified Self), will help one set a really sophisticated goal. Without any action though, you’ll have what Tony Robbins calls “impotent goals.” This is why we need to have…
Goal priming. This is the facet that actuates one’s goal. Think of it as the bridge between goal setting and goal pursuit. Researchers call them “situated intervention tools,” basically external cues that prime one to get after it. Making my morning espresso before my journals and experiencing the anticipation in the brewing, the smell before the tasting, and that gorgeous moment when it first hits my lips, all primes the daemon to come out to play. We can be creative with this, e.g. if you are working out first thing in the morning, leave your gym clothes near the alarm clock (which should never be near your bed) and have your loved one (which could be yourself) write an encouraging love letter to you, ending with a reminder of your goal. Priming leads to...
Goal pursuit. Setting a goal exercises a different muscle than actually pursuing a goal. Goal pursuit is where what gets put on paper meets reality. This is where things rightfully get messy and where the Stoic mindset is really useful. Important here is protecting one’s focus with...
Goal shielding. This is about protecting one’s focus during one’s goal pursuit. Sometimes it might be wise to put on the existential horse blinders, blocking everything else in order to attain your goal state. This might not always be wise, however. Having porous shielding might be better for you to see all the adjacent possibilities so you can quickly make a wise pivot. This brings us to...
Goal adjustment. Since pursuing goals is so messy, the failure rate is going to be really high. This is why the classic Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) presupposition is so fucking good: there is no failure, only feedback. Accept that you are going to set shitty goals, that either has low goal valence (aka are uninspiring) or are outright unattainable. Or perhaps they were great goals when you set them but unexpected shit just happened in your life and now it is wise to drop your goals or adjust them. Goal adjustment is a huge part of the artistry. We are thinking of incorporating psychometrics like the Goal Adjustment Scale in the BSD process so people can get a sense of how artistic they currently are with goal adjustments, along with methods to cultivate what researchers call “goal flexibility.” If the adjustments are wise enough, one might reach...
Goal attainment. This is about attaining your goal state. For BSD, this is the least important facet. Stoically speaking, attaining your goals is out of our control, so we do not concern ourselves with it. The failure mode with this facet is putting too much importance on attaining your goals, hence mutating goal artistry in service to success. This is not what BSD is about, as the essence of friendships of virtue is found in...
Goal accountability. While goal attainment is the least important facet in BSD, goal accountability is the most important one. BSD is about cultivating friendships of virtue, not about success for its own sake. Of course, success will surely be a happy epiphenomenon of the goal artistry process, but we are here to make virtuous friends. A part of being virtuous is keeping your word and doing what you say you’ll do. While attaining your goal state is ultimately out of our control (due to unforeseen circumstances or accidentally setting an unachievable goal), telling our gangs about our progress is often in our control. This is about connection, or communitas, the place where the real beauty is found. Making this process beautiful occurs when we engage in...
Goal beautification. I might have to walk back the statement about goal accountability being the most important facet because beautifying the whole process is that thing that helps turn one’s life into a lifework - art that exalts the sacred. I will share a brief story about a friend of mine who beautified one of his goals…
He and his wife wanted to quit smoking. During their goal pursuit they created bracelets; every consecutive month they did not smoke, they added a bead to their bracelets. They did this until they reached the twelfth month - achieving their goal of one year of no smoking. They wear their bracelets every day, as a reminder of their accomplishment and to their commitment to each other - to be the best and wisest people they can be. So beautiful.
How can we beautify all of our goals? Creating true art is often intrinsically motivating and beautifying the goal process could afford us to effortlessly flow with our goals.
Output Goals and Input Goals
We can get more nuanced with our understanding of goals and bifurcate them into two categories: output goals and input goals, a useful distinction from self-help blogger Oz Chen.
The lines can blur here, but the basic delineation is this: output goals are defined by their outcome and input goals are defined by their effort. An input goal may or may not be in service to an output goal. Here are examples of an output goal and input goal that I currently have…
Output goal - Publish a book of at least the first 100 entries of my journals before January 1st, 2022. If you were following my journals, I committed to this goal in my Feet to the Fire entry, perhaps with too much Stoic cowboy energy, because I am now a little worried I might not achieve this goal.
Input goal - Journal each day for at least 60 minutes before 10 AM. I do this every morning at the Collective Journaling sessions at The Stoa’s wisdom gym. It is my favorite practice, which is a practice that is consistent with my philosophical lineage of Stoicism.
In the above examples, my input goal is not in service to my output goal. I am not journaling each day because I want to publish a book. I journal each day because I love journaling. I find it incredibly rewarding. It helps me process my psychological confusion. It also provides me with a space to philosophize. I am philosophizing to myself here, towards becoming an artist of life. Publishing a book is simply something cool that may result from this practice.
That being said, lots of input goals are rightly in service to output goals, aka an Olympic athlete has the output goal of winning a gold medal, giving them a slew of input goals that involve sleep, nutrition, training, etc. The problem with self-help stuff is that it often conveys that input goals are always in service to output goals. This is not the case.
For BSDv0 we opted to focus on input goals more than output goals. This is not to say one cannot have the latter during their experience, but the emphasis should be put on the former. Stoically speaking, the right move is to focus on input goals, as one has greater control of the success of their input goals over their output goals.
We can have a further bifurcation and split input goals into “practices” and “negations.” Practices are input goals of activities you are adding, e.g. meditation, cold showers, working out, etc. Negations on the other hand are activities we are removing, e.g. eating processed sugar, using social media, masturbating, etc.
Ecology of Goals
We can also have an ecology of goals. This is what our friend Jacob Lund Fisker calls a “web of goals.” Given the distinction between output goals and input goals, along with splitting input goals into practices and negations, I see at least three goal ecologies…
Ecology of Desired Outcomes. All the goal states from your output goals.
Ecology of Practices. All of the regular activities you are engaging with.
Ecology of Negations. All of the desired activities you are putting a focus on not doing.
For BSDv0 each participant is designing their own ecology of practice and negations. We are coding the combination of these two ecologies the “DIY Ecology of Practices.” These ecologies are not being designed in isolation though, falling for the “autodidact trap” that John Vervaeke and Daniel Thorson were talking about recently at The Stoa. We are designing this in front of the loving eyes of our digital gangs.
I do think the monastic approach is a good one: go to a monastery and opt into an ecology of practices that is pre-designed for you. My sense though is that the world needs something new, as everyone’s transcontextual situation is unique. I sense that each person needs a bespoke ecology of practice to meet them where they are at, so they can start speaking to and through the daemon, as this is what allows one to give their gift to the world.
Letter of the Ecology and Spirit of the Ecology
Another useful set of terms in the goal artistry process is what I refer to as the “letter of the goal” and the “spirit of the goal.” The former is about how the goal is structured, e.g. an output/input goal that is SMART. The spirit of the goal is something different, and this is where things get spiritual. This is the real reason why you selected the particular goal you did - a reason that is a mystery to you if you are truthful with yourself. This is also the thing that breathes life into your goal, making you come alive when pursuing it.
Without the spirit, the goal becomes lifeless. If you are insistent on pursuing a lifeless goal, you’ll soon become lifeless. This is what makes a live player become a dead player. A different motivational schema will be needed to continue (e.g. shame, fear, hate) and your goal will soon become a disembodied goal. Disembodied goals make disembodied people. The artistry here is to ensure the letter of the goal meets the spirit of the goal. That is when the magic happens. And this is why goal adjustment is so important.
The same distinction can be applied to our ecologies of goals. The “letter of the ecology” is different from the “spirit of the ecology.” The art form of designing one’s DIY Ecology of Practice is about getting the letter and spirit into the right relationship with one another. The vision I am having here is this: people radically and wildly experimenting with their DIY Ecology of Practices, in an open way, that informs other people’s ecologies of practice. I think this is how the “meta ecology of practice” will get discovered, and perhaps how the daemon finally gets emancipated, but I am probably getting ahead of myself with those statements.
Are Values Needed?
Values. I never liked this word, probably because the self-help and business books have mostly dominated the practical literature on values, most of which I have read are conceptually vague niceties that are ultimately bullshit. Perhaps this is the case because those two bodies of literature are oriented towards Game A and not Game B. If one had a real clear sense of what their values are, they probably would not do the majority of stuff that is demanded of them from their jobs, careers, and lifestyles. This makes sense: having a muddled and obfuscated notion of values keeps people from examining their lives. And the examined life is the life that is revolutionary.
It could be time for the word “value” to be redeemed and for “axiology,” the philosophical study of values, to make an embodied comeback. Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) has one of the better understandings of values I have seen. They view values as a compass pointing you in a certain life direction, while goals are like mountaintops you’ll reach by climbing in the direction your values are pointing you towards. While ACT has some great stuff, my friend Joe Edelman has the best understanding of values in my opinion.
Joe used to run the “Social Design Club” at The Stoa’s wisdom gym and he is the founder of Human Systems (now The School for Social Design), where I was a student. In his article, “Human Values: A Quick Primer,” Joe understands the central concern of values as: the manner of our actions, rather than the consequences (as with plans, goals, and fears) or the mere fact of their performance (as with intentions, and policies).
My working theory is that values are closer to the spirit, giving us a greater sensitivity in how the spirit is asking us how to show up in life and what direction it is pointing our life towards. A conscious understanding of values could be helpful to tag onto our goals and ecologies, for the spirit to effortlessly flow through them both.
I’ll connect with Joe soon, to see where he thinks we can add values to the goal artistry process.
Other Considerations
Given the rough-draft nature of this primer, I will jot down other things that might be useful to eventually incorporate into the goal artistry process…
Ad Hoc Goals. These are like emergency goals that are wise to set to respond to some unexpected event, e.g. being invited to a meeting last minute then quickly setting an output goal beforehand - before the meeting ends share my idea about how I could make X project better.
Micro Goals. Related to the above. This is Navy Seal stuff. A micro goal during their hell week could be - continue running for another 10 breaths. The best micro goal is the one that gets you to the next.
Safe-to-Fail Probes. This is what our friend Dave Snowden calls wise experiments one does in a complex ontology. You do a time-bounded or criteria-bounded experiment to see the emergent possibilities. This gives you a better sense of how to process. The Stoa is just one safe-to-fail probe after another.
Fragplan. This is a military term to refer to a “fragmentary plan” - a planning document that is not complete, but wisely incomplete so adjustments can be made on the fly. I love fragplans. The Stoic cowboy in me loves slapping plans together so that a go, go, go energy is brought about.
First-Order Desires and Second-Order Desires. This is a philosophical distinction from Harry Frankfurt. First-order desires are desires to do/have or not to do/have something, while second-order desires are desires to want to do/have a desire or not to do/have something. It is good to get a sense of one’s desire landscape to avoid setting impotent goals.
Motivation Waves. A term from B.J. Fogg. This is a period of high motivation. It is good to have a sensitivity of when this happens and what conditions bring this high motivation. Relatedly, Seth Godin’s “The Dip” (a period in your goal pursuit when one’s motivation dips) or Steven Pressfield's “The Resistance” (a motivational resistance during your goal pursuit) are all good things to gain sensitivity towards.
Small Wins. Recognizing you had a “W,” however small, is a wonderful motivational tool. Examples: you spent less money this month, you spoke your truth to your parents, you made a breakthrough with your therapist, you received a really good compliment from a friend, etc. Have a place to collect your W’s and a space to share them with your gang.
There is so much more I could write about here: Most Important Task (MIT), swallow the frog, keystone habits, procrastination vs. precrastination, habit stacking, vigilance decrement, proximal closure, immunity to change, goal creep, individual zones of optimal functioning (IZOF), behavioral cusps, choice architecture, switch costs, implementation intentions, mental contrasting, force multipliers, desirable difficulties, positive affirmations, etc.
Some schools of thought that might also be incorporated into the BSD’s goal artistry process: project and product management, military science, sports psychology, operant conditioning, and various coaching modalities such as Solutions Focused Coaching.
What excites me most about BSD is that this is not an experiment where I am aiming to prove what I wrote above is right or really works. No. Like everything else I write in these journals, these are all provisional and oftentimes speculative thoughts.
BSD will surely inform, break, and reconfigure many of the things I wrote about in this entry. What I am doing here, with these journals, is philosophically cohering to what is happening outside of these journals. This is a delicious dance of course, and with BSD, it is becoming a collective dance.
There are so many intelligent and discerning individuals at BSD and from The Stoa, the place we are sourcing the first cohorts from. This is a collective experiment, where the collective intelligence is going to shape and make BSD in ways that will be surprising to all.
So, buckle up, the daemon is becoming a collective, and ready to virtuously light this place up, one goal at a time.
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