Realization: the way I relate to my goals on complice.co is… kinda like ritual magic. Basically by naming & enumerating the main careabouts I'm moving towards, I create affordances for invoking them as sources of motivation & clarity. 🧙♂️✨ Thread on naming goals 🧵
Naming goals as a kind of ritual magic
20 tweets · June 2020 · 176 likes · 12 retweets · read on Twitter
So @reasonisfun is checking out Complice, and messaged me today wondering about the word "goal", and the way the conversation went prompted some thoughts on my own goals. Here's what she said:
I sent her this definition of goals as one way to think about it, but I realized it was still missing something huge that I can illustrate by talking about how I relate to my own goals.
When @reasonisfun & I were talking about the idea of her interviewing me about Complice's design & philosophy, I thought "oh man, that would totally connect with my InterView goal" and then I'm like "huh, "InterView" doesn't really *sound* like a goal" 🤨
In particular, if you just saw the text "InterView", it probably wouldn't occur to you that that was the name of someone's personal goal. It probably looks more like a company or a software module. It doesn't express the end state like "debt free" or "release an album"
Yet I feel super clear internally what it's about, and have found it really motivating! So the name here is taking on some other role... 🤔 Something like reifying this thing I care about, so I can invoke it by its name in service of motivation! Sounds almost chaos-magicky 🧙
Let's take some other examples. A few years back I ditched my Writing goal & made one called "Semantic Design" which I think was an early teaser for the insight in this quoted tweet 👇 Writing's not meaningful, *meaning* is.
Other real goal names I've had that are quite evocative: - Habit-hacking (kinda meta & nice alliteration) - Tiger 🐯 (a fitness goal) - Global Network 🌐 (twitter, bay area friends etc) - Spinal Grace (towardsness re "posture") - Grok in Fullness (reading, notetaking, BASB, etc)
Talking with Lulie this morning & looking at the Complice goals/howto page, which is the first thing you see after you make an account, and it guides you to set your first goal, I'm seeing how inadequately that page expresses the power of [what I'm currently calling "goals"].
Today I started working on adding a definition to the page ("recognizable desired state in the future, that causes you to act differently in the present so as to realize it") But I'm realizing now that this is still not RELATIONAL enough. Same as this:
So it seems I'm currently in the process of doing foundation-layer metaphor design for Complice, and realizing that "goal" isn't an adequate metaphor in the same way that "todo" isn't.
"Purpose" seems substantially better, though can carry eternalist or other philosophical tones (see meaningness.com/an-appetizer-p…) Makes me think… "on purpose" vs "off purpose" 🤔 In 2017 I explored the idea of "shared purposes" on Complice that you could point your goals towards.
I like "project" in that it refers to projecting (Latin: throwing) something out into the future… but most people treat projects as much more concrete and (like "todo") external. I would totally say "InterView is a learning project" though.
Stepping back, thinking about Perceptual Control Theory brain model 🧠 (~= predictive coding with a figure-ground inversion)… fundamentally the entire PCT hierarchy is composed of nested [goals] in some sense, called "reference levels" or "targets" Hm. Not sure good words here.
Okay, but what really are these? When you're trying to enumerate your goals (eg in Complice) they can seem like "whats" (as tweet below) but on a day-to-day basis when you're picking tinier "whats", the goals are actually playing the role of "whys"! 🤯
Could I just call them "Whys"? That feels a little weird, but anything new is weird at first!
The homepage says "Progress towards what matters" & "Complice is for making meaningful progress every day." I think the first thing Complice needs to ask is not "what are your goals?" but "what matters to you?" Aha, here we go. I like this onboarding page much better.
At the top I billed this as a "thread on naming goals" and turns out that had 2 meanings! - what to name your personal goals - what to name the concept of "goals" itself And I think "whys" is closest. This redesign of the goals/howto page applies whys to both of those meanings!
The word "goal" shows up at least 500× in the codebase, so I'm… not gonna completely rename it today 😂 *And* I can at least reframe it for the initial onboarding experience. Page is now live! 🚀 If you haven't tried Complice, check it out here: complice.co/?utm_source=tw…
Also we're running some goal-setting workshops in a few weeks, and probably not gonna rename the entire concept of "goal" there either (would have to rewrite a ton of content & reshoot videos) but again you can bring in the "why" idea from this thread: