Designing goal-setting prompts that evoke your own whys

Many such cases, no doubt. Hmm... what can we do about this? exploration thread 🧵 t.co/WmRWUCQMrB

Oct 16, 2021

The initial goal-setting page is already pretty bold about going right to the heart of what's important to the individual, not just what they think is important. Here's the thread where I improved that a lot:

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Jun 5, 2020

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.

Is the framing of "goals" still getting in the way, even though it's not in the foreground on that page? Would it be better to just switch to "whys"?

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Jun 5, 2020

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:

Or maybe some people would need to be guided through a little meditation first, in order to tap into their deeper sense of what they want rather than their concept of what should be the highest level of their goal hierarchy. But others would hate that, hm.

Ideally the prompts would directly evoke peoples' own goals, but another approach would be to just include a step in the goal-setting wizard that's like "does it feel should-like? is it yours? reframe it until it really feels exciting & inspiring"

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · Apr 1, 2021

shit I accidentally adopted someone else's concept of a good life and was aiming for that instead of my own concept

One exercise that can be helpful for this, that I came up with years ago, I call "Just Do A Thing (that nobody’s expecting you to do)" (& don't tell anybody you're doing it!) This can be a great way to find something you want to do for intrinsic reasons! malcolmocean.com/2015/11/just-d…

Discerning the difference between what you really want and what you think you want is huge. Hard to overstate the importance.

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv · Oct 16, 2021

I think objectively speaking "guy achieves childhood dreams and is absolutely delighted, full of joy & gratitude" should be something that makes headlines every time it happens, so that we can all learn from it. "guy gets everything he thought he wanted and remains miserable" too

To some extent, probably you kinda have to try things to find which are yours & which are others, like @davidfactorial did which prompted him to tweet about this in the first place, but design makes a difference: "what should you have accomplished by now already?" = obvsly worse

Also to some extent these things can be entangled. You may want to do something, and you have a mix of your own reasons and others' reasons for wanting to do it. A mix of your own *meanings* and others' meanings.

I'm not gonna change the app today but this has got me seriously thinking... Wouldn't be that hard to rename goals "whys", if I thought that was net good. Could record a 2-3 min video that's optionally on that goal-setting page, to invite people to reach for their own dreams.