Three types of goals — skip if you know this

Skip to “Start small”

1. Short-term or instrumental goals

These goals are valuable only because they help achieve a different, usually more fundamental or intrinsic goal.

  • Dependent: only meaningful when linked to another goal.
  • Functional: action-oriented and practical.
  • Temporary or context-specific: can shift easily if another more efficient path appears.

Examples

  • Going to the shop (to obtain food → satisfy hunger → health/survival)
  • Completing a certification (to qualify for a job → financial security → freedom or fulfillment)
  • Saving money (to buy a house → stability or comfort)

2. Mid-term or strategic goals

These are intermediate goals that bridge instrumental goals and intrinsic goals. They provide structure and coherence over a longer timeframe and guide instrumental goals toward the intrinsic goal.

  • Medium-term: more persistent and coherent than purely instrumental goals.
  • Directional: shape and guide decisions about instrumental goals.
  • Bridge between instrumental (short-term) and intrinsic (long-term) goals.

Examples

  • Advancing your career (→ leads to personal fulfillment or financial independence)
  • Building skills or expertise (→ allows you to accomplish meaningful work, contribution to society)
  • Training for a half marathon (→ enhances long-term health, self-esteem, or resilience)

3. Long-term or intrinsic goals

These are ultimate goals valuable in themselves. They reflect your core values or aspirations. Achieving these goals is inherently fulfilling.

  • Intrinsically valuable: fulfilling regardless of other outcomes.
  • Self-contained: not necessarily dependent on achieving another goal.
  • Usually emotional, ethical, or experiential in nature.

Examples

  • Write and publish a novel
  • Learn to proficiently play piano, form a band
  • Visit all countries in the world
  • Run a marathon

Start small

Some sources that I studied propose setting up long-term (3-5-10-15 years) goals to motivate yourself going towards something big and exciting. But I consider this idea to be not just an extremely hard managerial task, but also potentially pointless if done wrong.

Setting a goal on a scale of one to several years means

  • defining something that you definitely want to happen that far in the future and assuming that this desire won’t change throughout upcoming months/years, otherwise your efforts might be wasted
  • understanding the process of getting to that goal, what it will require, what the steps to get there are, what the dependencies are, bottlenecks and so on, even though it’s very likely that you can only understand it during the process itself
  • estimating your daily/weekly/monthly productivity, even though you might not know what exactly you’ll need to do and how many resources you’ll have to commit across that time
  • estimating what is realistic to achieve with your time and resources, even though there are so many unknowns in this statement that your best bet is just making decisions by flipping a coin
  • actually understanding what the final result means and how it’s going to impact your life, even though you’ve never had it before
  • considering how this process might change your life and habits, what are the invisible trade-offs and sacrifices that you’ll have to make during your way to the goal, and at this point you’ve already made so many assumptions, that you don’t want to pursue this goal anymore

To set a goal, don’t start from a goal

A goal is actually just a decision-making tool that tells you what to focus on. Something that does not help you progress towards your goal is automatically deprioritized.

These tools are not designed to be used backwards — you can’t decide that you want something just because you set a goal to achieve it. You might trick yourself into believing this, but sooner rather than later this construct will fall apart.

I propose the following sequence:

  1. Values
  2. Interests
  3. Activities that bring happiness
  4. Short-term goals
  5. Mid-term goals
  6. Long-term goals

Note: happiness is an umbrella term for whatever good emotion you’re experiencing in a moment, read more about it in Happiness every day

  1. Values not only have the capacity to play a decision-making role in your everyday life, but ensure (if defined truthfully) that you get satisfaction from executing those decisions. After all, those are your values.
  2. Interests are a broader category that is based on your values. Now you have options where to search for satisfaction.
  3. Activities are how you act upon your interests. Activities deliver all the good emotions that are related to exploring your interests.
  4. Activities can be made into a habit, or scaled, or bundled with other activities, and all of that leads to short-term goals, like do something every week or do this with more people.
  5. Mid-term goals naturally develop when you start becoming more knowledgeable about all involved subjects, thus becoming more ambitious in your efforts.
  6. And finally this all leads to getting even more knowledge and ambitions to decide “yes, that means so much to me, that I want to spend an absurd amount of time to do something so cool, that I’ll probably explode with joy”.

Examples

There were a lot of abstract words, no more of that.

Answer this simple question — what would you choose?

  • set and achieve a grand goal in 15 years, very hard and complex, but with the everyday workload that is not guaranteed to bring you joy, especially if you start putting pressure on yourself when your initial estimation almost inevitably turns out to be inaccurate

or

  • do something you enjoy every day

That’s it, this is the whole idea.

Example of transforming a questionable long-term goal into a value-driven one

Bad long-term goal: I want to build a house for myself within 5 years.

Why is it bad? This is a solution for an undefined problem. I can assume that one can value living in a nice house or they enjoy building houses or maybe there are other urges at play.

Each value has multiple ways to be realized. For example, if I want to live in a nice home, there are more ways, other than just building it myself. Or if I like building houses, I can start working in construction, or start a house renovation YouTube channel, selling the houses after the project is completed. Establishing my values and interests first ensures that the selected tool will be my conscious decision.

Examples of scaling value-driven goals

I enjoy creative writing → Write and publish a novel or maintain a weekly blog

I’m passionate about music → Learn to proficiently play the piano, form a band, or regularly perform at local events

I find fulfillment through teaching and mentoring → Regularly mentor young people, become a recognized expert in my field, or teach a recurring class or workshop

  • Happiness every day
  • When achieving any goal, check Self-reflection, checking results against the goals, adjusting goals for a serious review
  • Or Achievement hunter for a playful one