Writing everything down and relentlessly questioning my priors. 2017 was a very difficult year, but one of the decisions I’ve most benefitted from was deciding

Writing everything down and relentlessly questioning my priors. 2017 was a very difficult year, but one of the decisions I’ve most benefitted from was deciding to write down my goals. I spent about a month, directly putting in at least an hour a day. I started by writing down what I already knew: I wanted to have a positive impact on the world, there are certain types of impact that I care about more than others, and that I wanted all of my decisions to operate on a long time-horizon. Immediately I found flaws. What actually is impact? What are the types of impact I care about? How much of impact is a result of mitigating risk vs. creating something new? When I got stuck, I would open up a new text file and write stream of consciousness until it physically hurt to continue. After a lot of iteration, I ended with an outline of my goals and my rationale that I was relatively happy with. And then I worked backwards to figure out what I should be doing today. It’s a constant work in progress, but this workflow has been immensely helpful. It’s given me a single source of truth for whether something is Actually Important, helped me prioritize, and made me realize when I was being irrationally demotivated or complacent.