Goals You Inherited From A Younger Self

Goals held for many years acquire a status that recent ones do not. Their age is treated as evidence of their importance, when it mostly indicates when they were formed.

The person who set it had less information

A goal formed at twenty was chosen with limited knowledge of the field, of the work involved and of what the person would later value.

Every subsequent year has produced information that the original choice could not account for.

Deferring to that earlier judgment means giving priority to the least informed version of yourself on a question about your own life.

Consistency does work that evidence should

Having stated a goal publicly and pursued it makes abandoning it costly in a way unrelated to whether it is still the right objective.

Effort already spent also weighs on the decision, though it cannot be recovered by continuing and is not a reason to continue.

These pressures are strong enough that people routinely persist with goals they would not choose today if presented fresh.

The goal and what it was for come apart

Most goals are chosen because they were expected to deliver something: standing, security, a kind of daily life, a particular relationship to work.

Those underlying wants change less than the goals attached to them, and often the same want is now better served by something else entirely.

Separating the two is the useful move. Asking what the goal was supposed to provide frequently reveals it is no longer the best route to it.

Reviewing is not quitting

Long goals are rarely examined because examination is treated as the first step toward abandonment.

Left unexamined, they accumulate obligation without accumulating justification, which is how someone ends up years into something nobody currently wants.

A scheduled review, at a set interval, removes the significance from the act of looking. Reviewing on a calendar is a different event from reviewing because you are unhappy.