Do Quests, Not Goals

I think what’s going on behind the verbal sleight of hand here, is focusing on the process (quest) instead of the outcome (goal). It’s the difference between doing a thing and having done a thing. I might enjoy having written a book, but I don’t think I would enjoy writing a book. And I don’t think calling it a quest instead of a goal would make much difference

Process over outcomes; systems over goals; growth mindset over fixed mindset; satisficing over maximizing; professionalism over amateurism; boring fundamentals over flashy tricks; response over reaction; agency over passivity; presence over regret and worry.

Unlearning Perfectionism https://arunkprasad.com/log/unlearning-perfectionism/

I am generally skeptical of systems that apparently mostly rely on the methodology of "call this thing another name and you'll change your approach to it". This thing works because there's a community / group session around it, but it would probably still work even if you just called goals - goals.

This has been said many times, but it is worth repeating from time to time.

It's analogous to “Have systems, not goals” or “Build habits, not goals” and I'm sure you can think of many such variations on the words, but at the end they all mean the same.

Don't choose a point on the line that is your life, choose a vector.

This reminds me of the "systems vs goals" mentality, which emphasizes focusing on having a good systematic process for the journey rather than fixating on specific outcomes.

Some prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28688643

Scott Adams (before he went a bit cuckoo) was a huge proponent of it and he exposed me to the concept in my mid 20s. It heavily resonated with me and fundamentally changed my outlook on several areas of life.

This specific framing of Quests vs Goals seems a bit more like a change in framing your perspective, but I see some similar concepts, eg:

> You don’t just get the novel started, you become a writer. You don’t just declutter the house, you get your house in order.

Isn't this just GTD (Getting Things Done) with different terminology or is my ADHD brain skipping over a more significant difference?

Thought-provoking piece, but I think it ignores one key item: we naturally gravitate to doing what we love. We don't need to write them down. I never wrote down, "build a dual-stack homelab with a handcrafted firewall and a 10Gbe fiber backbone with multiple VLANs and subnets and two virtualization hosts and a 12TB TrueNAS server, and DNS and Minio and DHCP and k8s." Of the hundreds of hours I spent on my homelab, I don't think I ever wrote down a "quest" or "goal".

Similarly, I love swimming in the open cold water, but I never wrote down, "Swim from Alcatraz twice". It wasn't necessary. It happened organically.

I'm surprised in the context of this discussion, that nobody has yet brought up James Clear's fantastic book: Atomic Habits [1] - one of the best selling non-fiction books worldwide over the last few years.

I read this book over the summer, and it's an incredibly easy to digest breakdown of all the reasons why people fail at their goals, and very simple mind hacks to change the way you approach achieving them through good habits and avoiding bad ones.

[1] https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

I've always found it interesting that when people encounter challenges and roadblocks when playing a game like Dungeons and Dragons, they are energized and sometimes even relieved the game is not too easy. But when encountering setbacks in work the default is to get frustrated.

I'm pretty sure it's not the type of challenge that differs. In DnD a lot of the challenges are logistical in nature or some kind of interpersonal conflict.

My take is that the main difference is perceived risk / perceived high stakes. In a game you are in a circle of safety, so you don't get as stressed about roadblocks - whereas if you perceive negative consequences for failing to reach a goal in real life, then any obstacle looks like a survival threat and the anxiety about failing distracts from fully engaging with the challenge. As an example outside of work: if you're playing DnD and the DM says: "the bartender gives you a rude look" you are intrigued and curious. If a waiter in real life gives you a rude look, most of our brain's will at least temporarily go into ego threat mode and fall into a default of freezing, leaving or arguing back. We will be distracted, bothered, and generally the opposite of open-minded and curious. My point is not whether these are ideal responses but to note how differently our brains respond in a situation where there is actually minimal risk, but our brain perceives high risk because of outdated programming. Another example in the other direction: people can easily start taking games too seriously and become ego-attached to the goal, and the same brain response occurs. These extreme examples strongly suggest that it is the perceived threat rather than actual threat that drive our responses, and perception can often be very out of whack with reality and inhibit effective problem solving.

For most people in most work challenges, the actual survival threat from obstacles is small. Our brains massively overexaggerate it because we evolved in a context where most problems (especially social ones) actually were life-threatening. I would even say that in cases where survival (or your income) is threatened by an obstacle, downregulating the fear/threat response will usually improve your chances of finding a solution. Negative emotions narrow attention, draw us inward and prevent both mental flexibility and engagement with the world, which make solving difficult problems much harder.

To summarize: given how much more inherently motivating it is to work on challenges that are similar in nature to the ones we procrastinate on in life, it seems worthwhile to try to downregulate our evolved fear/threat response when encountering obstacles.

I can't engage with this now. I'm a big GTD user because of my ADHD, I don't trust myself so I use the GTD system as a big crutch.

I pattern match "Quests" in TFA to "projects" in GTD, and "goals" in TFA to "3-5 horizon + someday/maybe list", I don't have time to give nuanced thought to this, but I'm posting my hot take that this looks like a useful tactical method to help oneself take projects off of your someday/maybe lists and work on them, but does not fully address how to make the time.

Wait, no, it probably does, but I'm already running over my break time so I'm leaving this comment here as an anchor to come back and review after work.

as I was reading the article I was thinking "Oh, you mean labeling your goals differently will cause you to think about them differently and hence, will cause you to plan differently". That is, there would be something tangible that would be different.

So I tuned in to learn more about the technique but I was disappointed to learn that there's nothing more to it at least in the article.

It just suggests to re-label your goals differently and think of them as "quests", but it doesn't mention anything more.

I really want to learn how to make my chores and boring goals fun so that I can go about them doing them. Can anyone please shed some light on this?

I have tried to gamify my work but it hasn't worked for me.

> Still, the tendency is to wait for a better, less cluttered stretch of time to appear before you do that. You will execute your great plans as soon as life becomes a little easier and more spacious than it is now.

> This is exactly backwards. Forming and achieving aspirations is how life gets easier and more spacious.

Sounds similar to the theme system that CGP Grey and Mike advocate for in the Cortex podcast.

https://www.themesystem.com/

I'd argue a quest can have the same pitfalls of a goal. That is you see it's so far off and do nothing about it on a continuous basis.

Process VS goal always depends on the person.

If someone has a goal, and everything around them is distracting them from reaching the finish line, the a quest would be irritating.

Opposite is true too, a goal might have been the goal to start, but life changed and now they're chasing something that doesn't personally matter any more.

For around 3 years, I was living in a Chaos where I wasn't paying attention to anything around, I was just working aimlessly and not thinking rationally if I'm improving or anything for that matter and my days were passing one after another, I can't remember the jump between 26 to 29 properly, if I did anything significantly. Long story short I joined a new start up last April as a Senior Dev and my productive shot up in terms of work getting done, then I started being mindful of what I'm doing weekly and retrospecting actively about work, eventually few months back while I realized that I haven't filed my taxes yet and I'm in better place in terms of work but anything personally I've no "goals" or things to be excited about. So one fine Sunday, I made a google doc for things that I need to do and I also lacked clarity about how my credit card charges work, Like I know I can pay a minimum but what really happens when I keep paying minimum , so I started noting down things that I would like to understand further in that google doc as a checklist, this is my weekend activity, I denote my weekdays for work and one weekend I dedicate to the things in the Doc. It brought a bit of sanity to life. So calling it either a Quest or Goal doesn't matter , what you need is a process that works for you . Now in 8-10 weeks I'm aware about : 1. How my credit card charges work, what reward it has, Also I'm approaching zero debt , I can't pay 3.5% every month. 2. I understand what happens if I use my credit card/ debit card in a foreign country, why I should a particular type of forex Card .

Also , I've noted all this learnings in the same doc because I can't really retain my knowledge after over a year but if I keep seeing it , it might help a bit .

(Also, I'm trying to actual be involved in conversations here , instead of lurking , so that I can actual form my own opinions )

After playing too much Zelda, I had the thought to make a todo app that was organized by Main Story and Side Quests.

The Main Story section would be projects, and those bigger more aspersions goals to move the story of life forward. Side Quests would be those little things along the way, that are usually one and done.

I ended up realizing building the app would really just be procrastination, and simply make a couple Lists in Apple Reminders for Main Story and Side Quests. Good enough.

Functionally, but I guess it’s not much different than Projects and Random, but I find it slightly more assuming.

A.k.a. “systems vs. goals”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcKTYvupJw>

I like how the name quest emphasizes the process, not the initially desired outcome. When you go on a quest you gain experience and have encounters that might even change your initially desired outcome. Instead of trying to reach an outcome you enjoy an adventure and change the human you are.

A quest is a journey where the final destination is not clear in the beginning. But if you are successful, you will be a better version of yourself on the other side of the journey.

this is reworded alan watts. life is like music, its not all about the final chrashing chord, so enjoy the journey. thats with all things, but not everyone flows like that. some people enjoy results and are ok being frustrated getting there. personally, i think that is physically unhealthy. you might have the mental fortitude to push on forever, but physiology is affected by stress, and friction / frustration causes stress. thats hormones and thus kind of unavoidable (but managable again... with the anti hormones.). stress management takes time though, building anti cortisol. so it would be more efficient not to build so much cortisol (enjoy the ride) so you dont need to waste your productivity time building anti cortisol.

I think it all depends on the individual. Some people thrive with a quest mentality, while others prefer setting goals. Some live by analyzing their days using a SWOT system and this push them forward. Others are used to setting one big goal and like a dream.

Depends on how your brain is wired, I guess.

Know what happens if I go on a quest instead of pursuing a goal?

I end up using every available moment of time to plan said quest.

So I don't do quests. I have goals. As long as I'm moving forward, it doesn't matter what specific route I take.

"It's the journey not the destination" written pedantically as though it's audience could only find a central loci of control by superimposing their life into Lord of the Rings

I feel like this is one of those gamified ways, we can tell our brain to work things on without burning out. But there will be a limit on how efficient we can go without getting bored or tired about.

Reminds me of Dream Mapping: https://www.squadformers.com/dream-mapping

It’s about replacing OKRs with stories and maps.

The power of words! Nothing new here really, it's the old systems/process vs goal story but actually I felt that one word make a cognitive shift, for me at least :)

As a professional procrastinator, even the title makes immediate sense, and has already helped me reframe my to-do list. I'll read the rest of it ...later.

It's helpful to learn to categorize things as urgent or important. Not many things are both and urgent always masquerades as important.

Great, it's a quest - I can use coconuts!

This is such a simple distinction, yet totally transforming and invigorating!

I appreciate a lot if people share such insights.

It's about the journey, not the destination ...

snarky part of me wants to say that X not Y is a trope that has been over used by people trying to peddle their own thing that is just a thin veneer of what was there before

but it’s easy to be a pessimist and pull down other work

i agree that goals are hard and in some sense, set people up to fail by making the target some ephemeral thing in the distance

maybe reframing it as a quest can help it’s something that can be hard it can change you the outcome might be different from what you intended

by all means. do quests. not goals. will go back to nike on this one. just do it

The timing of this is neat! We are going on a trip in a week~ and need to get a bunch of packing done and stuff around the house prepped etc. 2 days ago I was picking up a ring for my girlfriend and got a "fix it ticket" for something with my car. I have been really stressed because it adds a new thing with a timeline.

The one day I was stressing about it and called it a side quest to myself and immediately the stress dipped. It'll get done and it'll be fine. It needed done anyway and ultimately now I've been given a side quest by a randomly encounter. It's not exciting but reframing it like this helps reduce my stress and allow me to think about the other stuff while still making sure this gets done. So good timing on this post!