A goal set at time T is a bet on the future from a position of ignorance
Not only do I really like Joan Westenberg’s blog theme (Thesis, for Ghost) but this post in particular. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my life, career, reading Stoic philosophy, and studying Systems Thinking, it’s that there are some things you can control, and some things you can’t.
Coming up with a ‘strategy’ or a ‘goal’ that does not take into account the wider context in which you do or will operate is foolish. Naive, even. Instead, setting constraints makes much more sense. What Westenberg is advocating for here, without saying it explicitly, is a systems thinking approach to life.
You can read my 3-part Introduction to Systems Thinking on the WAO blog (which, coincidentally, we’ll soon be moving to Ghost)
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.
Because goals are often surrogates for clarity. We set goals when we’re uncertain about what we really want. The goal becomes a placeholder. It acts as a proxy for direction, not a result of it.
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A goal set at time T is a bet on the future from a position of ignorance. The more volatile the domain, the more brittle that bet becomes.
This is where smart people get stuck. The brighter you are, the more coherent your plans tend to look on paper. But plans are scripts. And reality is improvisation.
Constraints scale better because they don’t assume knowledge. They are adaptive. They respond to feedback. A small team that decides, “We will not hire until we have product-market fit” has created a constraint that guides decisions without locking in a prediction. A founder who says, “I will only build products I can explain to a teenager in 60 seconds” is using a constraint as a filtering mechanism.
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Anti-goals are constraints disguised as aversions. The entrepreneur who says, “I never want to work with clients who drain me” is sketching a boundary around their time, energy, and identity. It’s not a goal. It’s a refusal. And refusals shape lives just as powerfully as ambitions.
Source: Joan Westenberg