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How to Discover Your Life Purpose, Set a Primary Goal, and Stay On Track

Unless you are the Remover of Obstacles and Lord of Beginnings, you’ll probably need to pick just one goal at a time.

In my last post I wrote about why I think setting goals is important. I addressed some of my own reservations regarding goal-setting. Is ambitious goal-setting selfish? Is it obnoxious and annoying to others?

I suggest you read that post first. But if you’re ready to get into the details, my five step system for exploring life purpose and setting a primary goal is below.

It’s a long post, but it’s the whole deal. I’ve come to this system after decades of diversions and hard-won experience. So get a fresh cup of coffee, and welcome to my world.

Step 1: Soul-Searching, Purpose & Calling

Seneca’s reputation may suffer as a result of self-promotion guru Tim Ferriss quoting him so much. But before the Seneca backlash is in full swing, I’ll get this relevant quote in:

A New Approach to Goal Setting (Introduction, and Reservations)

Go with the path or hop the fence?

Over the last six months I’ve started using a new approach to goal-setting that I’ve found to be effective, enlivening, and motivating. I’m still ironing out the kinks in the system, but I’m far enough along that I want to share my approach and my results so far.

As I’ve mentioned before I consider myself to be (in role-playing game nomenclature) a “multi-classed character”. I have many interests and ambitions, and I find it difficult to pursue one at a time. I’m probably in the majority; it’s a rare human being who naturally has a single-minded pursuit or singular quest throughout their entire lives. Most people have many interests, like to do many different things, and want to acquire a wide range of experiences. Overall it’s an effective strategy — the multi-class character ends up with multiple skills set and diverse social networks, and is thus less vulnerable to economic downturns, changing popular tastes, and other vagaries of modern life.

The drawback of going broad, in life, is that you don’t necessarily get to go as deep (or if you do go deep, it takes you longer to get there). It takes longer to level up (to acquire achievements, recognition, mastery, and so forth).

So that’s one reason I’ve been refining and developing my goal-setting system; I want to go deeper and level up in certain areas. But it’s not the main reason. The main reason is …

Results and Impressions of 3-Year "Life Vision" Planning Experiment

Forest path (photo by Stuck in Customs).

About three years ago I wrote a detailed essay envisioning what I would like my life to look like in three years. I included details about where I would be living, what my house and working spaces would look like, what I would be doing during the day, who I would be spending time with, and so on. I included details about career, health, relationships, home improvement, spirituality, finances, my various businesses, and what I wanted to be doing for fun/entertainment. It came out to about 2500 words.

For the next few months, I allowed myself to make minor edits. Sometimes I would add a short section about a part of my life I had yet to consider in detail. Sometimes I would change something that just didn’t feel right. Some of the hopes and dreams I thought I had for my own life turned out to just be baggage from an earlier me. I no longer wanted those things, but it took writing them down to realize that. So I deleted those sections.

Then I saved the essay to a folder on my hard drive and went on living my life.

Working From Home – Six Ways To Bring Up Your Game

One of the many break-time activities available to people who work from home.

As a music producer/freelance database developer/blogger, most of my days are spent in my home office. I love working from home, and I hope I never have to “go in” on a regular basis again, but I remember I had a rough transition year or two (in terms of working-from-home flow and productivity).

I went completely freelance (no employer) around 2001, at the age of 32. I left a good job as the database administrator for the San Francisco Symphony (though I continued to do contract work for them for a number of years). I liked my boss, my co-workers, and the organization, but at the time I was tired of reporting to a small windowless room, tired of commuting from the East Bay to San Francisco, and bored with the actual work. I wanted to spend more time writing music and working on Loöq Records. In addition, I wanted to take a shot a writing screenplays.

The Lost Years

Over the new few years I went through some working-from-home growing pains.

Protect Your External Brain

We are all cyborgs.

The day after Steve Jobs died our studio PowerMac started to show signs of failure.  It wouldn’t shut down, it wouldn’t start up, kernel panics, etc.  My first instinct when things are going to shit in computer land is to back everything up.  It was also a good time to reevaluate my backup system.

We Are Cyborgs

Like it or not, we are all cybernetic creatures.  Without machines, most of us would be barely functional.  We use a combination of computer chips, hard drive and flash memory, user interfaces, global networks, and space satellites to help us communicate, navigate, think, remember, calculate, and create.

Artificial systems are slowly learning to protect themselves.  Apple’s Time Machine is a good example — it’s a backup system you don’t have to think about.  But we’re not entirely there yet — at this point in our technological evolution we still need to put some thought into how to protect our data (extra-brain memory).

A good backup system protects against:

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