Setting Lifelong Goals Solves for Complexity and Preserves Mental Capacity

While it would be hard to stress the importance of goal setting more than it already has been, I'm going to attempt to. From your time in school to basic level personal development when you enter the work force, goal setting has been a foundational strategy for many in achieving anything.

But other than getting things done, goals help us do something else perhaps far more important. Combatting Complexity.

The Complexity of Life

When it comes to making decisions, the most efficient number of variables is two. Yes or No. Left or right. Every additional variable makes each decision harder and uses up even more of your processing power in the process.

The world, and our lives by extension, are more complex than they use to be. As we become more connected, things that used to be kept separate or independent are now bumping up against one another. There are more variables that you have consider, and more to hold in mind at any one point in time. You are depleting more of your processing power as your decisions become more complex.

That's the problem with complexity. The more complex things get, the harder decisions become. The harder decisions are, the more energy it takes. The less energy we have, the more likely we are to make poor decisions.

Additionally, less energy means less capacity for other mental functions you need to live effectively, such as understanding, memorizing, problem solving, emotional-regulation, and empathy.

Goals Combat Complexity

Your brain is only capable of holding one perception at any moment. While you can switch between dominant perspectives, you can't look at more than one at any given moment.

Imagine you're making a list of pros-and-cons, you might be able to think of individual pros but you will have to switch perspectives before you can think of cons - you can't do both at the same time. Only when you've switched between perspectives a couple of times, do you have a list - a clear representation of the aggregate of variables which makes your decision easier.

That's exactly what goals do.

Goals enable you to create a single representation of an argument that comprises of compressed variables. Rather than assessing every tiny variable individually and attempting to view them in relation to everything else, you can use your dominant perspective (a goal), to simplifly, prioritise, reorganise, and group information to decide what to do, and perhaps more importantly, what not to do.

Goals On Goals

For example, if you set a goal for your health: which consists of only eating certain foods, or taking in a certain amount of calories a day, your decision whether or not to order a slice of cake for dessert all of a sudden becomes a lot easier. You no longer have to deliberate over other variables like your cravings, how much further you have to run tomorrow to burn it off, or how guilty you might feel after. Your goal makes the decision easier for you.

Add in a goal around money and that decision becomes even easier, because spending an additional $15 on cake is against your expenditure plan too.

The more goals you have, the less individual variables you have to consider because you've already made a decision on it, it's just compressed and tucked into a goal somewhere.

Save Your Energy for What's Important. Set Goals.

Setting goals is your mechanism for reducing your processing load, allowing compressed variables to form a single argument that you can put in a hierarchical order.

Set long-term goals for your health, money, relationships, career, leisure, and other big themes in your life. They'll help you swiftly decide if your family is more important than your career right now, or that investing your savings is more important than that trip to Japan.

Goals allow you to make harder decisions quicker and more accurately, while preserving your mental capacity for other important functions that will help you to thrive.

So, do you have clear goals?