Tiny Experiments vs Setting Goals

I’m not sure why the idea of “setting goals” always felt awful to me. Maybe because it implies there’s something wrong with where I am. Maybe because the thought of working towards one thing feels stifling. It feels so wrong in our modern world to not enjoy the idea of goals, when all the world around me stresses achieving more and doing more. But I can’t explain i332t, it’s something I’ve always felt, as far back as I can remember in elementary school when the concept of setting goals was first explained to me. It just didn’t resonate with my experience of life.

Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot of books about motherhood lately, and in one of them I came across the idea of “tiny experiments” instead of setting goals. As Jessie Harrold explains in her book, Mothershift:

Usually, when we modern humans want to experience change in our lives, we set goals. Goals can work really well in many life circumstances, but in a developmental process like matrescence [becoming a mother], goals are pretty useless. In a developmental process, you are, by definition, growing and changing at the very marrow of who you are. The self that creates a goal will not even be the same self that reaches it, thereby likely rending the goal itself irrelevant.

Enter: Tiny Experiments. Tiny Experiments are the opposite of broad, sweeping changes, the opposite of On Monday Things Will Be Different, the opposite of a pill that fixes everything. Tiny Experiments are just that: little incremental changes and explorations that might inch you closer to the shift you’re trying to make.

And I’m realizing this is more how I approach my life. I don’t know what job I want, but I’ve tried a whole bunch of different things to figure out what fits. I don’t know why I’ve had a feeling of being unfulfilled, so I used to try a bunch of things my life might be missing. I experiment to figure out what seems to feel right in my life. Is it because life itself seems too big and vast of a process to simplify to “goals”? Is that why I feel the way I do? I’m not sure, all I know is that this concept makes sense to me.

When I really think about it, some of the things I knew I really really wanted in life didn’t really lend themselves to becoming goals. I knew I wanted to get married and have a family, but those are things you can’t “make” happen. Eventually, I took a “tiny experiment” approach to dating, and tried different ways of meeting guys in order to figure out how to meet someone I could marry. To me, this felt far more natural than making “find a husband” my goal.

I’m far more comfortable with this than the more typical roadmap of, “I know I want to be a CEO and married by 25, so I will do x,y and z to make sure I achieve that.” I guess somehow that feels to aggressive, and also maybe too locked in? Like I couldn’t swerve if something better came along. In some ways, I feel like life is a grand adventure that isn’t really predictable, and the best things in life are often the unexpected.

And yes, obviously, goals are still necessary. You can’t achieve some things in life without making goals. It’s not always healthy that I dislike the idea of making goals. But I’m also glad that someone put into words why “goals” don’t always work for everything in life. Some things are more complicated than that.

Well, that’s enough for digging into my psyche for the moment. What about you? What do you like about the idea of setting goals, or do you like the idea of “tiny experiments” instead?

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