Have you ever set/pursued real life goals? Not joke ones or fakes you make up for a workshop exercise.
I haven’t. I’ve only:
a) picked among opportunities (50%)
b) stirred the pot to create new opportunities (30%)
c) allowed random play to snowball into bigger thing (20%)
Conversation
Replying to
What's the difference between choosing among opportunities and pursuing a life goal? Aren't those the same thing?
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Same here. If one did not believe that an outcome (aim) was actually an opportunity... does not compute.
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You apply to a bunch of jobs, get a few interviews, a couple of offers, pick one. That’s response to opportunities.
You decide you’re going to get to Mars or prove the Poincaré conjecture with no clear sense of whether there’s an opportunity to do so. That’s a goal.
Decided to start a company during college based on argument from my friend "we will never have better access to intellectual capital or more risk tolerance than now". Does that count?
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Are you trying to point to the distinction between present(ed) opportunities and those which are contingent upon one's capabilities at a future (uncertain) date?
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Roughly. It’s a loose distinction, not a fundamental one. An opportunity is access to a leveraged pathway to a valuable end. It’s easier but also more fixed.
Learning math for real after school let me down
In high school, among the posters I had on my wall was a plot of an SRAM chip. I understood the very crude basics of VLSI. I programmed minis and micros.
I said then "I'm going to design these computer chip things".
...
And I did.
[/massive Adrian Belew riff]
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Why not both?
I take opportunities for predictable subsistence.
I also have goals that require comfort with uncertainty and decades of abduction/deduction cycles to find the practical path. It takes passion and persistence.




