Ask HN: How do you think about life/career goals?

The easy answers to "goals, purpose, etc." all sound like an AI wrote them.

IMO most people asking about purpose in tech communities are already highly-experienced big-picture thinkers. They see generalized commentary as BS, because they already could have personally guessed as much.

For this reason I've found that it's more helpful to approach the topic from the more novel perspective: The little picture. (This is not the only other perspective, just the one I'm sharing here in case it helps)

Right now, today, this very hour, that's the little picture.

So imagine if your problem wasn't really big picture at all, but rather felt like it was, due to a cumulative buildup of a need for attention to daily little things. If life progress was far more tractable if approached from a little-picture POV, a series of choices that may change on an hourly, daily or weekly basis.

In that case what you'd want in order to find your purpose in life is more like a sense of every single day bringing new, specific, and maybe even preferably little, changes and discoveries.

These would then also inform your already-functional big-picture systems, and provide energy inputs for them.

To me this is really near-magical, because I, too, am a big-picture thinker and find hand-wavy comments about life in general to be pretty corny and unhelpful. But as a big-picture thinker, I also had to realize that I was naturally biased away from little-picture concerns. Even the helpful ones.

Truly helpful topics tend to include: What to read next, eat next, listen to next, surf to next, move my body to next, where and how to relax next, learn next, etc. Each one of these is now a fundamentally fungible, tractable topic at a micro-scale. These choices are also governed by right-now me, not the me who wrote my new year's resolutions.

This is just for consideration though. And, it's kind of assuming that you have the intuitive, big picture feel for how your life is going, in place and working automatically in the first place.

Running the "calm company" you mentioned, this kind of lens is also huge. Especially when it comes to becoming deft, powerful, and flexible with moment-to-moment work and tech choices for example. Yesterday's "notepad.exe deep planning session, 486, home den" can be today's "AI televangelist-directed schedule, laptop, ice cream for lunch experiment, try new blogging software". You will not likely miss much vitality or interest in your life if you are capable of taking this kind of perspective on your choices.

Hopefully that hits less directive for you, and more like anecdata. But also, I do consider this very advanced level in some ways. For one, it can be extremely hard to accept that the big picture isn't where all the focus goes, especially if it's a new concept that sounds suspiciously not like a poster on your boss's wall.

Human culture is also not currently very comfortable reconciling this thinking with the overbaked "is it stoic or hedonist" dichotomy, the "does it sound like the proper life advice I'd be interested in" self-and-self's-blindspot-protective routine, and so on.

Good luck with wherever this journey takes you.

This tiny book keeps me grounded to a mission of truly helping people and enjoying the process:

[1] https://sive.rs/a

For mental frameworks, I personally maintain a few different lists.

My bucket list contains stuff that I think would be fun to do before I die:

[2] https://taylor.town/bucket-list

My unbucket list tracks stuff that I am trying to avoid:

[3] https://taylor.town/unbucket-list

My now page lists my short-term projects and goals:

[4] https://taylor.town/now

I think it's really important to think about the life that you want and try to work backwards from there. What do you want an average day in your life to look like in 10 years? What can you do over the next month or year to inch you closer to that lifestyle?

I expect my dedication to one career niche years ago got the big picture out of the way. Must have helped me appreciate the near-term smaller things when they come along.

I think there can be life/career "obligations", life/career "responsibilities", and life/career "goals" in many ways.

Sometimes when it seems like "life" vs. "career" might be at odds with each other, it might be because underlying obligations, responsibilities, or goals are not well sorted to begin with.

Things like this are not always going to be well aligned if ever, but it can be an unfair advantage if there is more harmony rather than less.

>I realize how complicated it can be and how little you end up doing the thing you truly enjoy.

But these things are essential to business, especially if you are going to make the most of the (profitable[0]) part you truly enjoy on a daily basis. So you need to get it under your belt early and start devising how you will overcome any compromising effect.

>what you would like to accomplish from a life standpoint in the next decade what would you say?

Same thing. Just doing it is an accomplishment.

Every decade it has gotten easier in the career even though there have been major life upsets financially and operationally from repeated natural disasters.

Now for the next ten years I'm going to take advantage of the increased opportunities.

[0] As long as it's profitable, you don't have to pick the absolutely most profitable operation you can do. This can be a lot easier to accomplish if there is not really any greed factor, you still need a desire for a lucrative sustainable or growable opportunity, but you do not need to be obsessed when it comes to making every dollar that is somewhat within reach. Especially at other people's disadvantage. Sometimes the less aggressive business operator comes out way ahead of the shooting star. It could be like getting 250K for being on-call 24/7 vs 100K for easy office hours, either extreme may not be ideal for most so it may be best when there is some choice about how things like this balance out.

Honestly trying to think through what I do want now so I can work backwards. I have some ideas but I am not as clear as I feel some other people are.

Thanks again I'll read through your frameworks today.