System life. How to organize life to cope with uncertainty and achieve results without burnout
successful and cool, like everyone else, but it’s not clear exactly what. What difference does it make now that it should be specific? When I have the money, everything will become clear right away, and we’ll figure it out there. Just take my annoying job away from me now, put a couple of million on the account and give me everything that can be posted online in order to be loved and envied by everyone. I often observe how people with such dreams try to take steps to their realization. They read books and take courses to set goals. There they are immediately thrown from abstraction into goal-setting tools. For example, SMART, MOSCOW and the like. Such tools imply that the goal should be clear and specific. But how can a person put down deadlines and specific steps if he himself does not know the details or does not know how to correctly decompose the goal? If a person wants something so much that he tries to pack it into a goal, then it means that he did not have it before. He had never achieved such a goal before. How does he structure an endpoint he hasn’t been to yet? Without training and experience, nothing will work. Therefore, the target picture is a bridge that helps to make the decomposition of dreams more natural and understandable.
The target picture can be obtained in several ways, described below. You can take a dream and describe it in as much detail as possible. Schematically draw on a sheet or in Miro. This is some kind of picture. Just throw out all your wishes in one place. Describe the ideal image of the future. Not just a general description of how you are doing well and have no worries, but describe it in as much detail as possible where you live, what people surround you, what you have, what you do and why. At the same time, everything needs to be verified at once with the questions «why» and «what for» to check that you are describing your desired life, and not ways to stand out from others. You can go from the opposite. Take all the undesirable phenomena, write why you don’t like them, and how it should be ideally. For example, I worked at a factory, in poor conditions, with a terrible schedule, without prospects and enthusiasm. I knew I didn’t want all this. I formulated such an idea for myself that «I want to work in IT, in the field of website development. In a young growing company with a flexible schedule and loyal management. I will have a great team where I will grow. Our projects will help people, win competitions and set the bar for quality in the industry. I will be appreciated, and my career will constantly go up.» I didn’t know the target picture as I wanted, but I knew exactly what I didn’t want and what it needed to be replaced with. Note that there is no specific city, deadline and details anywhere. These are all the same abstract wishlist, but with protrusions that you can cling to in order to start detailing. The purpose of the target picture is to take the first step from abstraction to concreteness. Get all the visible components of your dreams. This will make it easier to move on to the formation of goals. It is also an additional step to verify dreams. Do they correspond to your desires, and do you need it in general? It sometimes happens that the target picture raises so many questions to the dream that you wonder how this dream appeared in your thoughts? There are so many questions that we need to understand further. It is impossible to form a target picture correctly and incorrectly. Any attempt will already clarify the decomposition of your dreams, and it will be easier to set goals. If you can’t make progress in creating the target picture, then this is a wake-up call. How can you set goals, if even at the general level you have no idea what your dream consists of. Whatever goal setting template you are given, you simply won’t be able to write anything there. After all, this level is more detailed than the target picture. If the target picture is difficult, then make drafts, think about the dream, imagine the result, make several versions. Think about it, analyze why exactly this is what you want in this form. And after a few iterations, get your target picture. The main thing is to understand what and how it should be in the future so that you are satisfied. Our path is a route from the current situation to the goal. But the goal is not the end point. There are many of them. Goals are the results that need to be achieved in order for the target picture to be brought to life. The target picture will help you immediately approach planning intelligently and set goals in the right sequence.
Goal setting
After we have figured out where we want to move, the most interesting thing begins. We need to plan how we will do this and set goals correctly. As you may have noticed, for me the goal is the result that will lead me to the dream. That is, to the realization of my desires. I am not talking about the purpose of life, I do not consider the word «goal» as something global. A goal is a tool that allows you to capture the characteristics of a future version of my current situation in order to build a reversible plan to achieve it. For me, the desires themselves and the correct system of how to move towards them are more important. Goal setting is the next stage after the target picture, and it is not the last. Therefore, in this section we will not be preaching about how important the goal is, and say that an aimless life is bad. Many books have been written about this, research has been proven and tested in practice. It will only be about how to organize the goal-setting process so that it produces progress, not stress.
Now I am writing a book about my system and methods, but my relationship with goals has gone through all the typical stages from disappointment to admiration. They developed approximately according to this scenario:
1. Carefree childhood. I’m sitting on my parents’ neck, I’m studying at school and I don’t suspect what awaits me in the wonderful adult world;
2. Then the student years. I just live without thinking about the future. Only worry about being expelled from the university;
3. Graduation time is approaching. I promise my girlfriend a car and wait for the best employers to start fighting to invite me to work;
4. Welcome to adulthood. I understand what exactly Kurt Cobain meant to say.
«No one will die a virgin. Life will fuck everyone»
They don’t give me an opportunity to work, I live in a dorm with cockroaches and I don’t know what to do. I work as a system administrator at a service station, then I connect the Internet to apartments, I begin to hate myself and this life. Not to mention the status of a babbler who promised a car and boasted that everything was under control. As a result, I get a job at the factory, and The Groundhog Day begins;
5. Work, home, work. Goals? What goals? No, I haven’t heard of them. Everything is done either by acquaintance, or by just getting lucky. I live, work, endure and blame everyone around me that everything is the way it is;
6. It seems that something needs to be done. I try to read books. They write about goals and success. But it’s easy to write in books, everything is different in life, so I call BS on your goals;
7. I watch the movie «The secret». Wow! You don’t have to do anything, just visualize the desires, and everything will work out. How stupid it is, I won’t do it;
8. I really want the changes to start by themselves. They say it is necessary to write down the annual goals on paper, burn, dissolve the ashes in a glass of champagne on New Year’s Eve and drink. Yes, I really did it. It didn’t work;
9. They say that it is necessary to write down annual goals on paper. Just do whatever you want, and it will come true. The power of writing by hand will work, and the result is in your pocket. I’ve been writing A4 sheets for a couple of years, nothing happens, I just write out of habit and I don’t believe in it myself;
10. I learn about the methods of setting goals. They advise setting goals according to SMART. So that everything is clear and detailed. So that even the salary should be specified, with a deadline and at the current price level. The goals have become longer, but still useless;
11. Disappointment. No matter how you write down these goals, nothing comes true, everything is useless. I have enough of deceiving myself and keeping my head in the clouds. I will write down real goals, simpler ones that I can really master in a year.