The other week someone introduced me to the idea of “input goals” and “output goals”, by Oz Chen. Oz writes about “personal development and content strategy”, so…
Open Source Goal Setting — Open Tech Strategies | Blog
Treat this list as a menu, not a buffet. Pick three items and make them your high priority targets. Focus on effects that connect best to your strategy, and, ultimately, to your organization's mission. You need to know where you want to go before you can chart a course to get there. We've broken the goals into three categories, but you can mix and match across or within categories as you please.
A revolution in our sense of self | Nick Chater
Psychologists have tried to plumb the depths of human motivation to make sense of our behaviour. But our inner mental world is a fiction, sustained by constant improvisation
The Motivation Blueprint | Learning Development Accelerator | Professional L&D Community
You can buy an ebook from us directly or wherever ebooks are sold (Apple Books, Amazon, B&N, etc..
Cherdleys on Instagram: "This is relationship goals 💖🫶🏻"
98K likes, 573 comments - cherdleys on March 29, 2026: "This is relationship goals 💖🫶🏻".
Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity
Specification gaming is a behaviour that satisfies the literal specification of an objective without achieving the intended outcome. We have all had experiences with specification gaming, even if not by this name. Readers may have heard the myth of King Midas and the golden touch, in which the king asks that anything he touches be turned to gold - but soon finds that even food and drink turn to metal in his hands. In the real world, when rewarded for doing well on a homework assignment, a student might copy another student to get the right answers, rather than learning the material - and thus exploit a loophole in the task specification.
When AI builds itself
Our progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications.
Self-Control and Optimal Goals: A Theoretical Analysis
Consumers set goals to achieve a variety of objectives such as losing weight, saving for retirement, and achieving better health. A large body of literature in psychology and consumer behavior shows that goals can help consumers achieve these objectives. However, there is almost no research that examines how we should set optimal goals. The purpose of this paper is to develop a parsimonious framework that examines how goals can help performance and how we should set optimal goals. We use the literature on hyperbolic discounting to model these issues. Our results show that goals can often increase performance but can also sometimes encourage procrastination. We show that some goals are worse than having no goals, even when the goals are achieved and the consumer exerts more effort because of the goal. We also find that the presence of goals can lead to myopic consumers behaving as if they were hyperopic. Our results also show that the most difficult goals should be assigned to consumers with moderate levels of motivation and self-control problems. We also find that it is sometimes optimal to set goals that are never achieved.
Ambition - An Essay by David Whyte
Ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is frozen desire, the current of a vocational life immobilized and over-concretized to set, unforgiving goals.
Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead
Whether its our careers, health or relationships, we often set the bar too high and end up feeling disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Try this new way of thinking … and you may just see some real results
Asana
I’m delighted to finally be investing in Asana, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time. One of the things I’ve learned about companies is that 1) clear tasks and goals, 2) clearly communicated,...
A Systems Literacy Manifesto
In 1968, West Churchman wrote, “…there is a good deal of turmoil about the manner in which our society is run. …the citizen has begun to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.”[1] Churchman was writing at a time of growing concern about war, civil rights, and the environment. Almost fifty years later, these concerns remain, and we have more reason than ever “to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.” Examples abound.
"AI" and Productivity
[I keep bringing these up on Bluesky, so I think it’s time to gather them up and make a post out of them.] This is a collection of articles...
Need Some Help Reaching Your Goals? Try These 5 Habit-Tracking Apps
They can help you set — and stick to — your goals
