System > Goals

Rajan Balana on August 17, 2023, Category: Learning

Goals! “You must set goals in life”, productivity gurus have been shouting from the roof.

I think goals don’t work for me. Because of the timeline pressure associated with it. It makes it hard for me to give my best.

Another thought that scares me is what will I do after I have achieved my goal. The most obvious answer usually is set another (more ambitious) goal. It is a never ending cycle of constant pressure, void and disappointment.

I’m not saying goals don’t work. Or you shouldn’t set goals for yourself. You definitely should. And they work best if you understand how to set them.

When I set goals, I consider them as milestones I want to achieve, they work best for me.

On top of the milestone, I believe in making a system. Let me explain, what do I mean by making a system.

A system is something where you take on an atomic activity and do it every day. For example, reading one page every day, writing one paragraph every day, and so on.

And systems are infinite in nature and they produce compounding results in the long run. It might feel in the moment that no visible improvement is happening but it’s only after following the system for a sufficiently long amount of time one can feel its effect.

Nuance – You’re being missed!

Rajan Balana on August 16, 2023, Category: Random

No doubt, our attention span is decreasing. Modern day content is optimized for views. Titles are clickbaity. So are thumbnails.

Short form content has blown up the social media usage. Shorts, Reels, Stories, and shit. People are glued to their devices than ever before.

In this race to bottom, one key thing is overlooked, ‘Nuance’. Endless consumption of content has corrupted our brains. Such short span of time spent on a single piece of content isn’t enough to truly understand it. We are forced to take things at face value, based on how they look on the surface. It takes effort to find how it works under the hood. This false sense of understanding has long term effects. It gives us the illusion that we are becoming smarter by consuming so much variety of content, but in reality, it is making us dumb.

Since we don’t understanding anything, we merely are aware of it.

Almost everything you read, watch on social media has a lot of nuance associated with it. And that nuance is crucial for understanding the true meaning of the content.