Many people don’t know why they do what they do. They just do things.
Some people have goals. They know why they do things: to achieve their goals. These people are capable of deciding not to do things on the basis that it doesn’t match with one of their goals. Let’s call a goal paired with an action a project.
Not many people think carefully about the positive and negative side effects of their projects, but some do. These people are capable of deciding that although a certain goal sounds attractive, the negative side effects of the project aren’t worth it.
Very few people think about how their projects effect their other projects. This requires being able to think about multiple projects at the same time. People who are able to see multiple projects at the same time are capable of noticing that some projects are in tension with others. These people are capable of deciding to stop doing a project because it conflicts with other projects.
At a certain level of proficiency, this becomes thinking at the level of the life as a system. It becomes intuitively obvious to people thinking at the level of a system that you can’t just change one thing; make a change in one project and it ripples through the whole system of one’s life, in sometimes subtle and non-obvious ways.
In fact, the whole notion of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ effects of any given action begins to break down. Sometimes an effect that might appear to be negative will have a positive effect somewhere else in the system. As this sort of phenomenon is observed more often, the boundary between goal, positive effect, and negative effect begins to blur. Instead, actions are seen to have effect waves that move through a system in novel ways.
At this level of thinking, the activity of lifestyle design inverts. It goes from top-down goal-setting and project management to something much more fluid. Instead of keeping an eye on individual goals and projects, attention rests on the overall emergent performance of the system as a whole. Details that attract attention are things like friction, bottlenecks, value misalignments, momentum, and apparent fluidity.
Observation of the life-as-system becomes much more important as the predictability of action effect-waves drops, and experimentation and iteration become guiding principles of decision-making. Goal-setting takes a backseat to increasing one’s exposure to, and ability to act upon, serendipitous opportunities.
Further Reading
Most of this letter is straight from Chapter 5 of Early Retirement Extreme, of course. Other texts in the soup:
Cal Newport’s podcast episode The Problem with Grand Goals. As I listened to it I realized he was talking about systems thinking applied to his framework of the Deep Life. I loved how well he articulated the point that if your system is well designed, you will be presented with more interesting opportunities than you could have thought up on your own. Really cool stuff to do is an emergent effect of a well designed system.
Donella Meadow’s Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System is required reading for systems thinking insight.