I have a personal failure: I can’t talk to girls at a club. Not just club. I can’t talk to a random girl in a cafe or a bookshop. I can’t. I just can’t. I’ve tried to work on this personal failure a few times. One time, as I recall, I sat down to deliberate and came up with a multi-point plan to work on this fear. It looked like this.
Honestly, I did suck on the third one, and I still do. But these weren’t the issue, were they? What was actually a lack of confidence issue turned out to be a full six-month plan to improve everything in my life. But I had convinced myself that it was the right solution. So I didn’t go to a club for the next six months because I was so damn busy preparing for it.
It was March of 2022, And I had decided to leave my job in Korea and figure out the next step. I felt stagnated for some months, and this was a well-thought-out decision. So, I started finding jobs in India, but I hit a roadblock. I wasn’t ready for the interviews. So, I sat down to deliberate again and decided I needed to practice coding questions before applying for interviews. And I would quit my job once I found the next one. Two months passed, and I had only solved some 30-odd problems. And my target was to solve 300. It was a non-sensical target. I don’t know how I came up with this number. So, four more months passed, and I was still unprepared for the interviews according to my own definition. I eventually quit without completing this target, and what was asked in the interviews at companies I applied to wasn’t coding problems.
In both these cases, I had made a goal that was ambitious, big, and related to the issue, but they were actually missing the main point. They were pseudo-goals. Goals that make you feel like you are progressing, but you are actually not. Pseudo-goals become a hindrance in pursuing the main goal. Making progress towards the main thing is difficult and scary. Whereas you can be jumping around side goals for eternity and never do the main thing, thus protecting you from the actual failure that matters. Failing on side goals won’t cause you the same pain. It’s an important exercise to do sometimes to check whether the goals you have set are meaningful goals that move your life ahead in the direction you want or they are pseudo goals that will eventually waste your time and effort.
“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” ― Robert Brault