[Saadia] Compass Goals

What even is a goal, anyway?

https://diggingforfire.blog/posts/compasses-over-maps/

An async podcast by Saadia Carbis and Joshua Wold.

A Pretty Good podcast.

Chapters

• 0:00 Map Goals vs Compass Goals
• 6:51 AI Design & Development Tools

Transcript

0:00

Hi, welcome to Async. This is Saadia. Async is a back and forth conversation between Joshua and myself about technology, app development, and remote work. It's nearly the weekend, Friday afternoon, and we're just getting ready for Shabbat. I'm going to go up right after recording this and pour myself a whiskey and assign jobs for the kids and watch them do the jobs. I'll be the manager. I don't know about how it is in the United States, but around here, that's how road work gets done. You drive past any road work, and there'll be maybe one out of ten people doing any work. The rest are supervising. Anyway. All right. Goal setting. Man, this was a big topic last week, and it's been a big topic for you for a little while. So I did some soul searching. Because I figured, I think you and I are talking about different things when it comes to goals. I think maybe even talking past each other a little bit, because when I say goal, it doesn't mean what you think it means. And when you say goal, anyway. And goal is really such a broad term. So what did I do? Of course, I wrote about it. I wrote a post about compasses versus maps. I think you should have goals, but you should have them as compass goals, not as map goals. And it doesn't need to be in running, by the way. It can be in anything. But you can just have a hobby that you don't have any goals in. But maybe you do have it in running. I don't know. Anyway, so what's a compass goal and what's a map goal? Well, I'll just sort of define it really briefly here. I've written more about it on diggingforfire.blog. But I guess what I'm trying to say is a map, you get these kind of goals in the business world, right? Where it's a KPI and you've got like, they say, you know, a good goal is measurable and it's got a fixed amount of time. The same with resolutions, you hear this. And so you can check in and see how far progressed towards your goal are. And you've got these two axes, right? Value and time. And you're charting the distance and you've got the destination. And this is like a map. But I don't think our goals should be like maps. They're rigid and they get boring really easily. And I think that that maybe is what happened with your marathon. And also, once you've gotten to the destination, they end. And that's the end of it. And so maybe that's good and you make a new goal. But this whole process, it just gets really banal really quickly. And so I think instead we should turn to compasses. A compass, all it does is it gives you a direction. I want to get better. And you're going to also have a territory that you're getting better in, right? I'm starting piano lessons on Tuesday. I'm so excited and I'm going to get better at piano. That's my goal. I just want to get better at piano. I just want to run a little bit faster. I just want to run faster. I just want to be able to get through the day without my back hurting. You know, these are sort of goals that are very broad, very generic, and they can last forever. And we can take detours and we can slow down and we can have fun with it. And we're bound to discover along the way all of these serendipitous moments because we're not rigidly following a path trying to keep as close as possible to that line that goes up and to the right. So compass goals, I think that they're good. You said in the last episode, can I have a life worth living without defining where it's going to go? Well, yes, of course you can. Every life is worth living. But of course, that's not really what you're asking. I really do think, like, I thought about this, right? I mean, I think that the default answer is, yeah, of course. Yeah, sure. You don't have to define where your life's going to go. Just enjoy your life. Live it. Well, it's worth living. Yeah. But if you really think about it, I think lives are more worth living when you're going somewhere, when you've got something that you're aiming towards, when you've got a direction on your compass, I think that that makes life better. I think it makes it more worth living. It doesn't have to be all buttoned down with, by this state, by the time I'm 23, I want to have achieved, I want to have made $200 million and been on the Forbes most eligible bachelor list. If such a list exists by Forbes, I don't know who publishes that most eligible bachelor. I actually, might surprise you, never been on that particular list. The point is that you can have a goal without having it to be so rigid. Building on, like, the concept you introduced last week about, like, this virus, a business is a virus that just has to keep growing and growing. That's because it has hard-set map goals that don't have any flexibility, that it's rigid. Whereas a compass goal will let you explore more. I think, like, as I was thinking through this episode and reflecting on your previous episode, this podcast is actually a great example, right? If you and I weren't dedicated at all, it wouldn't, it just wouldn't go anywhere, right? We'd stop, we'd stop podcasting, one of us would stop and then we'd lose interest and whatever. We have this episode 50, by the way. Congratulations, high five. And that would be the end of it, right? We need some amount of discipline, but we don't need to have such rigid goals, right? We don't have, like, we're going to podcast three times a week, every week, and or we're going to grow to a thousand listeners within six months. Those are map goals. We don't need those. And when we have those, we get burnt out and we get over it, right? And you get my point by now, I think. All right. On the topic of AI design tools. You're right. I have no desire to use AI design tools, but the truth is I don't really use design tools without AI. So, you know, occasionally I'll fire up affinity designer, but not really. On the other hand, I have some mixed feelings about coding tools. They're great. Like, I use them a lot and they make the job a lot easier, but also I find that they're starting to make the job a little bit boring. Like, sometimes if I don't know how to do something, I'll defer to an AI and it usually helps a bit. Or if I just need to get started, it's a really good way, as I think we talked about previously on this show, it's a really good way of going back and forth between like a bit of broken code in an IDE and a chat GPT window is, it just, it feels like a bit soul crushing. I don't really enjoy that. That's not the job I signed up for. It's like AI is doing all the work and I'm just passing messages along. It's making me realize that I actually just love programming. There's like a joy to it. I love building stuff. I just love it. And can AI steal my job? Can it take my job so I don't have a job anymore and do all the programming? Yeah. Maybe one day, not yet, definitely not yet, but maybe one day AI will take my job. But I would still want to be a programmer. I would still want to be programming on my own, maybe with a little bit of AI co-pilot assistance here and there, just because, just because I love it. Does that make sense? And I think that that's what AI is going to push or rather pull out of everyone. It's, it's going to force people to reconcile with this question. What do you love to do? Thank you.