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Comment by giis | Hacker News Reader

"In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important."

I find this is quite new & profound.

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Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has recommended the systems approach vs. a goal-oriented approach. I think he explains it in a more accessible way. Here's his presentation pitching his book: Passion is Overrated and Goals are for Losers http://www.slideshare.net/Scottadams925/goals-are-for-losers...

He also writes about it in "How to fail at everything and still succeed" but probably in less depth since I think it's only a chapter.

Profound, yes, but also pretty much as old as time. "Don't do something, be someone." "The journey is more important than the destination." Etc. etc. Maybe new to folks who're used to a goal-obsessed environment. Nice to see that more people are opening up to it.

Thompson is not exactly saying that the journey is more important than the destination; he's saying that as we grow and change and experience different things, we become another person, and therefore the destination is irrelevant.

The goal we may have had when we started, doesn't change, but we do, and so it's unlikely that we desire it as much as we did or thought we did.

We can't "make it" because there is indeed no destination. The meaning of life is to grow.

> The meaning of life is to grow.

That's exactly the message on "the journey is more important than the destination".

"It's not about the destination it's about the journey" is extremely cliche in my experience, though it may be good advice.

Yes, banality to an embarrassing extreme. That someone would comment "I find this is quite new & profound" gives me a philosopher's wince.

Oh well, maybe said commentor is 10 years old.

A lot of academic philosophy can be boiled down to the same sort of simple conclusions. The difference is you have to wade through hundreds of pages of dense self importance to extract them.

Oh, someone came to a conclusion that you had come to before? How inferior must they be to you.

It may be cliché, but it's still hard to comprehend until you reach a life goal and have to ask yourself, "Wait... Now what?"

It's much easier when there's a milestone -- just pick another one. (Graduated? Graduate again!) Then you run out of milestones and have to ask more difficult questions.

Agreed, I find myself the same way. I end up keep asking myself. Is this really what I want in life? or perhaps there's another avenue or path that I could take that would fare better for me in the long term

The real question is one of assigning value to each goal. The valuation changes as do you.

It is easy to get into a local trap of running for a goal you no longer value. It is also easy to get trapped in switching between goals without progress.

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