2  Goals

Activities are either goal-oriented or intrinsically motivated. To be clear, this is different from whether or not they are spontaneous.

• An intrinsically motivated activity is done just to experience it. In many cases, it’s similar to grabbing balls out of a bucket and not seeing what you’re grabbing until it’s out of the bucket. The results (possibly some causing others) of the activity are represented by the balls.

• A goal-oriented activity is done “for” something that could come after.

When you have a goal and you know that you are not already moving toward it, the familiar response is to just add a bunch of highly focused goal-oriented actions. But this is incorrect for many or all social goals, including the goal of getting married. This goal should mostly be treated as the last straw of the way of life that kept you away from the goal. The correct response is deeper, includes multiple missions, and could move you toward multiple things instead of only the “last straw” goal.

These are the basic elements of the correct response:

• Goal-directed or intrinsically motivated tweaks to interpersonal encounter selection (choose to be around certain people in a particular moment, choose to join a certain club, etc.)
• Intrinsically motivated social interactions only, with no fundamental dependency on the other elements (prefer concurrency over interdependency), and with a very narrow set of exceptions including short term goals such as:
  • Making yourself stronger
  • Knowing other people and being known (be a little careful with this one)
• Goal-directed analysis of observations about people or of the “balls” from social interactions