Anti Goals

Think about maximum miserable

I recently heard a great concept around “anti goals”.

For anyone who knows me, I’m a big goals guy.

Goals keep you accountable and accountability leads to discipline and consistency. Which is how you achieve anything.

Choose the life you want through negatives.

This is a similar concept to how Rory Sutherland talks about deciding on how/where to buy a house.

Instead of using all the generic filters that everyone uses (sq ft, garden, parking, rooms, bedrooms, location proximity to “X”). Use anti-filters. Use things that would be seen as negatives, but things that aren’t a big deal to you.

For example, if you don’t have kids, whether they are already adults or you never plan on having any, proximity to a school might actually be a negative point. So if you are buying a house and it’s near a school, you’ll actually be paying a premium for something you don’t want….

In the same way, the example Rory used was around railways. In the UK trains finish at around 10.30/11pm, he states he never goes to sleep before midnight, so this doesn’t bother him and he’s a train guy so win-win on a “negative”.

There’s so many examples of these around but bringing this back to anti-goals, it’s simply setting up your life for maximum negative (and then working backwards from there).

Inversion thinking

Humans are not very good at predicting what makes them happy, but instead understand what will make you miserable.

In this way, you can can create your own anti-goals or inverted filters similar to those explained in the housing example above but for areas of your life.

Personally, I dislike waiting around/queuing more than pretty much anything. But I’m not opposed to travelling if I can work/read/write whilst doing so. Hence why Uber (back when it used to be good) was a game changer. A cheaper, faster way of travelling than all other alternatives.

In careers for example, for me, maximum miserable would be working an office job where I have to be in certain locations for certain amounts of time, answering to someone who I don’t believe is capable.

The opposite of that is essential how I live, but other people might reframe their max negatives, because it’s not like there’s not risks to this way of life.

Another example of maximum miserable in work/careers would be; working on your own all day, every day, weekends, without money coming in, the stress of not knowing whether this will work and having no one to speak to most of the time along the way.

That’s basically what the first few years of business can be for most people when they start-up. So if that sounds worse than the first option, I understand the choice. Everyone is different.

But this anti-goals approach is quite an interesting way to think through things and I’d recommend doing it for at least one area of your life.