What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting

When your projects are clearly tied to your strategy and your strategy is clearly tied to your vision and your vision is clearly tied to your values, you know that what you're working on really, really matters.

Activities with ameliorative value are those that prevent something bad from happening or occur in response to something bad happening.

There is no guarantee of finding “good work” today no matter your qualifications or connections—

Your ability to pay your bills might depend on whether your hunt for the next freelance gig is successful.

describes what happens as a result: “our lives become about the struggle to keep up.” She continues, “To truly feel our experience with depth and presence, we would have to slow down a lot (which would make us less efficient consumers, students, workers, prisoners, soldiers…).”

goals become a sort of technology for self-erasure. We learn to recognize all the ways we don't fit in and the rungs we haven't yet climbed and define our future selves against those traits. We rarely—if ever—stop to think whether the things we're not are actually a core part of who we are. And that's not just a personal problem. It ripples out int

professionals who read about time management or achieving goals 20 years ago predominantly fell into that category. But today, the reality is very, very different.

When I'm truly engaging those critical thinking skills, I'm much less likely to blame myself for failure. I'm less likely to fixate on my own shortcomings and how to overcome them. Critical thinking created a more satisfying life for me than positive thinking ever could.

Games—whether they're sports, board games, video games, or party games—necessarily simplify values and goals, providing the structure for play. In playing a game, we temporarily take on those values and goals for the pleasure of the experience.66