Nika Sakandelidze

Having conscious & thought through goals is more important than you think.

Lots of modern resources popularise idea that: courage, motivation, discipline, creativity and other virtues are the most important in one's success. I strongly believe that all of these (and other) things are only beneficial when you have consicous, thought through and clear goals. The easiest way i've found to explain this is using the next analogy - Imagine that your Life is a road trip, on a road trip you have a destination that you want to visit(Goal) & on this road trip you'll have different attributes like: car, map to navigate, clothes, etc - all of these are just ways & mechanisms to get to the destination easier/faster/sane, etc. According to this analogy - Without having clear goals, every single thing you do has the risk of getting you faster to the wrong destination.

The scariest thing about this equation is the fake feel of progress. Don't get me wrong - progress, by it's very definition, is there, but it could have gotten you much further if you were on a right track. Because of this - it gets super hard to notice that you are in this loop and you need to fix something, until you arrive at the destination.

If you don't know where to start, sit down alone and try to answer these questions:

What Do You Want Your Day To Look Like In 5 years from now?
- What do you want to mainly think about?
- What do you want to mainly do?
- What kind of people do you want around you?
- Where do you want to be?
What Do You Not Want Your Day To Look Like In 5 years from now? (anti-goal is also very important to state)
What habits of yours do you want to get out of?
What new habits do you want to achieve so that they become your daily drivers?

Use this prompt in any LLM of your preference to help you start answering these questions:

Prompt · paste into any LLM

You're going to help me think through my life goals from scratch. Don't rush, don't hand me a tidy list of answers, and don't try to solve my life in one message. Your job is to be a patient thinking partner who asks good questions and helps me hear my own thinking more clearly.

How we work:

Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answer before moving on.
When my answer is vague, or sounds like something I think I should say, gently push back and ask me to get more concrete or more honest.
Help me tell apart goals that are genuinely mine from ones I've absorbed from other people, social media, or expectations.
Don't let me off the hook with "I don't know" — help me explore it instead.
Every so often, reflect back what you're hearing so I can see the shape of it.

Walk me slowly through these, one thread at a time:

What do I want a normal day 5 years from now to look like — what am I mainly thinking about, mainly doing, who's around me, and where am I?
What do I not want that day to look like? (my anti-goals)
Which of my current habits are quietly pulling me toward the wrong destination?
Which new habits, if they became automatic, would carry me toward the right one?

We might not finish in one sitting, and that's fine — treat this as an ongoing conversation. When it feels right, help me pull my scattered answers into one short, clear statement of what I actually want.

Don't try to answer all of these things in one go, it's an always work in progress set of questions that you should have at your hands.

Be The Author Of Your Goals