Ask HN: How do you think about life/career goals?
I have coached a lot of people about this kind of stuff.<p>The easy answers to &quot;goals, purpose, etc.&quot; all sound like an AI wrote them.<p>IMO most people asking about purpose in tech communities are already highly-experienced big-picture thinkers. They see generalized commentary as BS, because they already could have personally guessed as much.<p>For this reason I&#x27;ve found that it&#x27;s more helpful to approach the topic from the more novel perspective: The little picture. (This is not the only other perspective, just the one I&#x27;m sharing here in case it helps)<p>Right now, today, this very hour, that&#x27;s the little picture.<p>So imagine if your problem wasn&#x27;t really big picture at all, but rather felt like it was, due to a cumulative buildup of a need for attention to daily little things. If life progress was far more tractable if approached from a little-picture POV, a series of choices that may change on an hourly, daily or weekly basis.<p>In that case what you&#x27;d want in order to find your purpose in life is more like a sense of every single day bringing new, specific, and maybe even preferably little, changes and discoveries.<p>These would then also inform your already-functional big-picture systems, and provide energy inputs for them.<p>To me this is really near-magical, because I, too, am a big-picture thinker and find hand-wavy comments about life in general to be pretty corny and unhelpful. But as a big-picture thinker, I also had to realize that I was naturally biased away from little-picture concerns. Even the helpful ones.<p>Truly helpful topics tend to include: What to read next, eat next, listen to next, surf to next, move my body to next, where and how to relax next, learn next, etc. Each one of these is now a fundamentally fungible, tractable topic at a micro-scale. These choices are also governed by right-now me, not the me who wrote my new year&#x27;s resolutions.<p>This is just for consideration though. And, it&#x27;s kind of assuming that you have the intuitive, big picture feel for how your life is going, in place and working automatically in the first place.<p>Running the &quot;calm company&quot; you mentioned, this kind of lens is also huge. Especially when it comes to becoming deft, powerful, and flexible with moment-to-moment work and tech choices for example. Yesterday&#x27;s &quot;notepad.exe deep planning session, 486, home den&quot; can be today&#x27;s &quot;AI televangelist-directed schedule, laptop, ice cream for lunch experiment, try new blogging software&quot;. You will not likely miss much vitality or interest in your life if you are capable of taking this kind of perspective on your choices.<p>Hopefully that hits less directive for you, and more like anecdata. But also, I do consider this very advanced level in some ways. For one, it can be extremely hard to accept that the big picture isn&#x27;t where all the focus goes, especially if it&#x27;s a new concept that sounds suspiciously not like a poster on your boss&#x27;s wall.<p>Human culture is also not currently very comfortable reconciling this thinking with the overbaked &quot;is it stoic or hedonist&quot; dichotomy, the &quot;does it sound like the proper life advice I&#x27;d be interested in&quot; self-and-self&#x27;s-blindspot-protective routine, and so on.<p>Good luck with wherever this journey takes you.