Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/lost-purposes-doing-whats-easy-or-whats-important/

A friend came to me with a startup as her main goal. I am keen on my coaching skills so I would from time to time ask her what the top 3 most important things she could be doing today would be. She would proceed to come back with a list. A few days later I would check back and ask her what she got done. She would very excitedly tell me all about the other things she was doing that weren't the top 3 things.

I watched this behaviour for a while before commenting. Eventually I asked her about it and she conceded she was doing tasks that seem easier than the important things because they feel like progress, say by doing four small 15 minute tasks you got four things done right? Whereas if you work on an important task for an hour you only got one thing done.

Our brains like to use Rule of thumb type judgements to know what pathways to follow. In this case, Am I making progress towards my goal was replaced by, have I completed things which was easily gamified by, How do I do the most little things I can.

The same thing happens when people pay attention to their health. Get healthy turns into, Lose weight, which turns into unhealthy body images and great confusion. Although this is probably more related to us not being clear and specific on what the health goal was in the first place.

So what say you have a lost purpose. You want to do X but you find yourself doing the remarkably similar Y. How do you fix that?

1. Be specific

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where–" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.

It's not going to work 100% of the time, but it does help.

Imagine you told a monkey to go collect coconuts, every coconut the monkey brings back you will give him one reward. You mean the large useful ones that you might find in a supermarket. Knowing how important coconuts are but not really understanding the task, while collecting large coconuts he finds some smaller ones, realising he can carry two half-size coconuts instead of one large one, he goes to find more smaller cocon...

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