The Goal Gradient

The more abstract a goal, the harder it is to act on. The more concrete a goal, the easier it is to optimize for the wrong thing.

“I want to matter” is true but useless as a daily directive. “I want this job at this company” is actionable but might be completely arbitrary. Most of the confusion in figuring out what to do with your life lives in the space between those two.

Think harder, zoom in from the abstract to the concrete, land on the right answer. But it doesn’t work that way. The concrete goals easiest to chase are usually ones someone else defined for you. The abstract ones that feel most authentic are too vague to ever be wrong, which means they’re too vague to ever be useful.

Everyone wants to be great. That part is stable. The desire to matter, to do something significant, that doesn’t really go away. But greatness is the most abstract goal there is. You can’t act on it directly. You need intermediate steps, mental models, some kind of scaffolding between “I want to matter” and “what do I do on Tuesday.” And those intermediate steps carry the same tension. Concrete enough to follow. Wrong enough to mislead.

The question then can be reduced to the following.

Should I take actions