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Comment by GPerson | Hacker News Reader

I think the article sets up a pretty silly and false dichotomy between goals and constraints. You’re not doing anything without planning, and you’re not doing anything with only planning.

Anyways, the following part does resonate with me. “Setting goals feels like action. It gives you the warm sense of progress without the discomfort of change. You can spend hours calibrating, optimizing, refining your goals. You can build a Notion dashboard. You can make a spreadsheet. You can go on a dopamine-fueled productivity binge and still never do anything meaningful.”

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The article is mostly talking about life goals or ambitions:

“There are times when goals make sense. Training for a marathon. Preparing for an exam. Trying to ship a product by a hard deadline. In finite, controlled, well-understood domains, goals are fine.

“But smart people often face ambiguous, ill-defined problems. Should I switch careers? Start a company? Move cities? Build a media business? In those spaces, setting a goal is like mapping a jungle with a Sharpie. Constraints are the machete.”

“Do you want to be someone, or do you want to do something?

“Goals often come from the first desire. Constraints come from the second.

“One is about image. The other is about identity.

“And the latter has more room to grow.”

There is a better article hiding in there, but I think it is making a good point.

In business/investing circles, this is known as "analysis paralysis." There is no limit to the amount of preparation you can do in anticipation of a big purchase or effort, but past a certain point the returns are not only diminishing but substantially negative due to the lost opportunity cost.

In a lot of contexts, taking action with incomplete information is better in the long run than spending a lot of time weighing every decision and taking fewer actions as a result. And there are studies out there that show this.

An example: Not that I advocate individual stock picking, but if you spend 3 months researching the best biomed company stock to buy, you may be decreasing your risk of picking a bad one, but you are just as likely to miss out on 3 months of positive market-based returns that you would have gotten had you just picked _any_ company with a positive balance sheet.

The quote mentioned reminds me of one of key lessons of Oliver Burkeman’s wonderful book, Four Thousand Weeks. Highly recommend - it’s a book about happiness disguised as a book about productivity.

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