Inputs and Outputs, not Actions and Goals
Discover the system
When we are figuring out what we want to do in order to be happy we often are told that we should focus on a long term outcome and work backwards from there.
That makes perfect sense but it’s very difficult to actually do. It’s hard to stretch ourselves to both imagine the unknown future at the same time as trying to focus on the known present.
And no matter what, by definition there is always going to be some uncertainty that the decisions we make now are either not going to result in that end goal or, almost worse, that they are going to get us to the desired end but it turns out we don’t really want that goal when we got it.
This all means that though most of the time we start from the point of view of where we want to be in the future, the fuzziness of a future goal, no matter how much it resonates with us, finds it very difficult to compete with the clarity of the present’s immediate fires.
As a result what happens is that we end up focusing only on what we need to do today.
To a certain extent, that shift is clearly necessary to avoid analysis paralysis. We can’t constantly be thinking of where we want to be tomorrow but not actually doing anything today that gets us there.
The trouble is that we get stuck in the tactical present. We know we have an ultimate goal but we forget to check to see if our current activities are still getting us there.
Instead that goal becomes just a checked box, “yes we have a goal” and that’s it. It loses its connection to our day to day lived reality and we find ourselves having burned a lot of time and energy without having made any progress and often not having made any difference.
Unfortunately, this becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop because once we lose sight of that long term goal we no longer have a standard to measure the effectiveness of our current actions and thus our confidence in those actions decreases and our uncertainty increases.
We are still instinctually aware that we have drifted from our path but we are not necessarily consciously aware of that. Instead our sense of unease and discomfort begins to effect our judgement.
We put more energy into our actions but without a goal in mind, we just get more uncomfortable. A vicious cycle ensues: highly energetic but ultimately pointless action drives a sense of panic which drives more pointless action.
We end up drifting into a view that an action is an end in and of itself.
Sometimes we become aware of this and attempt to refocus on a long term goal. But times a-wasting, we feel bad that we’ve done all this pointless action so our panic shifts our attention to the future and we try and focus on a goal just for the sake of having a goal, regardless of whether we actually give a damn about that goal. We again spend more energy and more time and again ultimately feel like we’ve wasted both.
But this shift is an opportunity. When we feel our actions are pointless and instead try and focus on the future, we can recognize that this is actually a false choice, it’s not “and instead” it’s just “and”.
The choice is not between immediate action and long term planning. It is between immediate action vs immediate action related to a long term plan.
The solution is to view our immediate actions and our goals as part of a continuum.
Our actions are inputs into a system. That system being the context we are living in: our work, our family and friends, our education, our society, etc. And our goals are the outputs from that system.
That system starts out as a black box but as we enter inputs and observe their effect, we can start to understand the inner workings and begin to emphasize actions that, as inputs to this system, will be transformed to the outputs we desire (ie our goals) and avoid those actions which the system will transform to outputs which are further away from our goal.
(In fact, sometimes doing nothing is the “input” that is necessary to get to a certain goal.)
By thinking in terms of inputs and outputs rather than actions and goals we are able to hold everything in our head at once. We don’t need to artificially and arbitrarily separate our present from our future. The one transforms to the other.
Our inputs, our actions which we have control over, get transformed to our outputs, our goals. We don’t have direct control over the latter but by understanding better and better how the system transforms those inputs we increase our confidence as to what actions to take and make it much more likely that we achieve our goals.
