The older I get the more it sinks in that 90% of effectiveness is just taking a thing seriously enough. That translates to just wanting the thing itself rather than adjacent things that may or may not happen as a side effect. Most things sort themselves out if you’re serious. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1279285975860953090

When you’re serious, you are naturally efficient because you don’t get distracted by side goals. You’re naturally as productive as needed because under or overshooting what you seriously want.

Most of the time ambiguity in goal-setting is not about wanting the wrong thing or being confused about means-ends matches. It is about wanting the thing wrong. You want to want the thing-itself. The naked, nominal, stated goal, not psychologically adjacent bullshit.

Half of experience is recognizing when you want the thing versus when you want the thing only because you unconsciously want something else that’s a potential side effect you don’t want to cop to.

The inefficiency of unacknowledged goals cannot be six-sigmaed away. If you’re working out to look good or for endorphin rush l, but pretending to work out for strength/health (even to yourself) the dissonance will make you ineffective at both. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1164362068205531137?s=21

There’s something like “starter” motivation though. Many entrepreneurs start out with chip-on-shoulder motives, like wanting to prove their worth to some bully who punched them at age 8. But the good ones eventually graduate to wanting the actual thing they’re building.

Motivation is a skill. Wanting things is not something you can just “do” beyond lollipop level at age 3. You have to learn to zoom in on the thing that vaguely attracts you, with enough precision that the motivational feedback loop kicks in. Like a starter motor.

This means iterating through various configurations of means and ends, laying on your couch, until the energy surge kicks in and gets you off the couch knowing precisely what to do. Energy must match precision. Otherwise you’re still confused.

If you feel like you’re going to bust through lack of clarity about what you actually want with raw force, you’re in for disappointment. Motivational ambiguity and uncertainty is not the same as environmental uncertainty and ambiguity. It doesn’t yield to brute force.

The 20s are easy. Almost everything people think they want turns out to be indirectly about wanting sex or a partner (or dealing with inability to get them). Once you sort out your feelings about that, motivation around other things gets much simpler. Things get messy at age 30.

Kids know how to actually want things until they turn into teens. Then it gets so hard, they start failing badly at it, attribute it to “angst” and decide they’ll never be able to want things with the clarity of 8-year-olds again. Not true. Just gotta learn adult version.

A lot of goal-selection precision is just emotional range in disguise. The more feelings you’ve felt, and the wider the range of intensities, the more the right goals will click unmistakably in any situation. Gen Z seems to be rediscovering Gendlin/focusing for training this.

Verbal precision is equally important for complex goals though. Goal-motivation-fit is the right word or phrase locking into the right precise emotion about a thing.

For simpler, more somatic goals, something like the description of archery in Herrigel’s Zen and the art of archery is a good guide. Or the inner game of tennis. But for something like a large corporate team project, words become necessary.

Hollywood has a good model for this, in terms of the high concept of movie pitches.

A bad failure mode is when means are clearer than ends. You half-ass learning to want “get a good job” because the means, “do well in college” doesn’t require that clarity of purpose. Then you get the job and realize you don’t want it because you never interrogated the goal.

Incompletion typo in tweet 2. Should read “because under or overshooting what you seriously want kills motivation”

A big part of locking on to motivationally sustainable goals is learning to quit unsustainable ones. This means taking “not feeling it” feeling seriously. It’s almost always a necessary and sufficient reason to quit. Or phone it in at bare minimum if you can’t quit practically.

Emotional fail fast heuristic. Sometimes this is misleading, but usually there’s something off internally. And often externally as well (missing information, felt but unarticulated risk, etc)

Move fast and break things.

Feel fast and break goals.

Crash early, crash often.

Sometimes you can name the reason for quitting (eg “afraid”) and that itself can supply a new motivation for doing it (“build courage”). But then you’ll do it differently. Like running at the high risk part instead of navigating around it wondering why you’re doing it at all.