Birthday, Goals & Anti-Goals

Birthdays are a self-reflective time for me. Over the past few years, I have usually set goals for myself, with the longest time horizon being five years. I even made a few videos for my future self, one in 2023 for my 25-year-old self, and others throughout the past three years for the following year. This is the one I made last year. Part of it has been omitted for reasons of privacy.

My thinking has changed a lot since I made these. In fact, even when I was making them, I never felt truly aligned with the words I was speaking. There was always some underlying emotion, one that came about through influence, motivating the expression. It had little to do with how I view the world and what I believe, and more to do with what I allowed to be imposed on me, with little to no reconciliation as something I ought to fulfill.

To be clear, it is not that I have moved away from wanting to accomplish the things I set out for myself. I have taken issue with the goal-setting enterprise and have instead embraced something JA Westenberg, on whose YouTube channel I came across the idea, calls anti-goals.

Anti-goals, in the way Westenberg describes the term, refers to setting constraints, not goals, as the basis for organizing action. It involves clearly laying out what you will not do and by doing so, limiting the paths of possibility to one that results in success. An example of this could be, instead of saying, “I will start making $10,000 every month within the next three months,” you could say, “I will not do any work that pays below $1,000.” For the sake of reducing complexity, $1,000 has been chosen arbitrarily.

Goal setting induces a kind of vagueness, a dreamy state of thought that one has to fill in. The natural recourse in thinking that follows is bottom-down, with questions such as: “What are all the ways I could achieve this?” “What should I try first?” “Am I choosing the best possible path?” In contrast, a constraint induces a more first-principles-like approach. After putting the constraint in place, one has to think, “What type of work can I do that is worth at least $1,000?” “Do I require any additional skill to charge this consistently?” “What immediately disqualifies something from being worth that?” The path of possibility in action narrows rather than expands, as it does with goals.

It comes more intuitively. It is easier to know what not to do than what to do, and that compression makes focus a natural extension of the methodology. There also seems to be a neurochemical benefit. Each time one remains steadfast in a self-imposed constraint, especially when there was an opportunity to act otherwise, there is a dopaminergic reward that replaces what would, in the other case, be tied to the completion of a broken-down goal.

Fundamentally, a constraint is self-expanding, as opposed to a bad goal, which in one sense does the opposite. As in the previous example, setting a target of $10,000 can limit certain behaviors that might result in something greater, or at least incline thought toward a kind of tunnel vision.

Goals tell you where to go. Constraints determine what survives long enough to get you there.