I’m a bit confused about this because “getting ambitious slowly” seems like one of those things where you might not be able to successfully fool yourself: once you can conceive that your true goal is to cure cancer, you are already “ambitious”; unless you’re really good at fooling yourself, you will immediately view smaller goals as instrumental to the big one. It doesn’t work to say I’m going to get ambitious slowly.
What does work is focusing on achievable goals though! Like, I can say I want to cure cancer but then decide to focus on understanding metabolic pathways of the cell, or whatever. I think if you are saying that you need to focus on smaller stuff, then I am 100% in agreement.
Does what I said here and here answer this? the goal isn’t “put the breaks on internally motivated ambition”, it’s “if you want to get unambitious people to do bigger projects, you will achieve your goal faster if you start them with a snowball rather than try to skip them straight to Very Big Plans”.
I separately think we should be clearer on the distinction between goals (things you are actively working on, have a plan with concrete next steps and feedback loops, and could learn from failure) and dreams (things you vaguely aspire and maybe are working in the vicinity of, but no concrete plans). Dreams are good, but the proper handling of them is pretty different from that of goals.
I’m a bit confused about this because “getting ambitious slowly” seems like one of those things where you might not be able to successfully fool yourself: once you can conceive that your true goal is to cure cancer, you are already “ambitious”; unless you’re really good at fooling yourself, you will immediately view smaller goals as instrumental to the big one. It doesn’t work to say I’m going to get ambitious slowly.
What does work is focusing on achievable goals though! Like, I can say I want to cure cancer but then decide to focus on understanding metabolic pathways of the cell, or whatever. I think if you are saying that you need to focus on smaller stuff, then I am 100% in agreement.
Does what I said here and here answer this? the goal isn’t “put the breaks on internally motivated ambition”, it’s “if you want to get unambitious people to do bigger projects, you will achieve your goal faster if you start them with a snowball rather than try to skip them straight to Very Big Plans”.
I separately think we should be clearer on the distinction between goals (things you are actively working on, have a plan with concrete next steps and feedback loops, and could learn from failure) and dreams (things you vaguely aspire and maybe are working in the vicinity of, but no concrete plans). Dreams are good, but the proper handling of them is pretty different from that of goals.