Now I should be able to provide the proper context to what I’m going to be doing in the next four months.

To recap, I decided to spend the next four months (until October 10, 2009) figuring out my purpose in life, and testing myself on my ability to achieve goals.

Why the urgency, and the diligence? That is a good question — I agree that a normal expectation is for people to take their time figuring out their purpose in life. However, I believe it’s because the expectation is that most people are already pretty much on the right track (note that I think that’s the expectation and not necessarily the actuality). Once they figure out their purpose, there will probably only be a small correction necessary. Likewise, they don’t need to test themselves on the purpose because it’s achieved naturally and has wide acceptance criteria (i.e., it’s hard to screw it up).

While this may be the thing I do, I don’t think this is my purpose in life. In fact, a thought that my purpose in life would in some way be highly correlated with how I set up my life doesn’t resonate with me. I feel that my purpose in life should be greater than myself. It’s not a well-defined thing yet, just a gut feeling, but I’m going to go with it for now (unless I prove myself false). I think it has something to do with respect for mankind.

Given this I can no longer safely say that I’m on the right track (perhaps I need to be doing something entirely different with my life). This provides the task of figuring out my purpose in life with a notion of urgency. Similarly, I can no longer be sure that I’ll be able to achieve my purpose in life. Hence, I want to test myself.

I don’t think this is unique to me, necessarily. I believe that for most people their purpose is greater than themselves. I would encourage everyone to figure out their purpose in life as soon as possible just in case I happen to be right.

I think before I can say more about what I’m going to be doing for the next four months, I should provide some historical background on what ultimately motivated me to come up with my goals (which are to (a) find my life goals and (b) test myself on the ability to follow-through on goals). It’s an interesting case study that I hope will inspire other people.

On October 5, 2008, my twenty-fifth birthday, I decided to come up with 25 things to do while I’m 25. I decided to ask my closest friends to give me their recommendations for what should make the list. I wanted to avoid bias of any kind — so I asked my friends not to collaborate, but once I received their suggestions, I resent them all to everyone (the idea being that more information should only yield better recommendations). At first I wanted everyone to vote on what they want to see on the list, but W.G., a friend of mine, pointed out that such a scheme would provide me with all the mediocre suggestions (since they are most likely to be voted on by most people) and really not capture the spirit of the idea. Instead, I looked through my friends’ recommendations, and assessed how well they understood my goal (unfortunately that exposed me to some bias but I tried to be very careful about that). The responses were interesting — G.D., one friend of mine, gave me anti-suggestions (things from the aggregated list that he does not want me to do).

At the end I picked 10 of my friends’ recommendations and selected the other 15 (there was overlap between the two which allowed me to fill my list with more than the initial 5 items). I didn’t want my friends to influence my fulfillment of these goals so I didn’t publish the list with the intention to publish all goals that I met on October 5, 2009.

I found myself be incredibly disciplined around this list. For the first 7 months I’ve been working at these goals, and while I wasn’t going as fast as I would have liked to (plus, even though the goals were measurable, they were all different; some of them would take an entire year while others would literally take a couple of hours), I was very pleased with myself. I had a direction (at least for the next year) and I was going in that direction.

This is when I realized the importance of having goals, something to strive for.

And then, one day, I started thinking about this list. The goals were not logically connected; they were a laundry list of skills I wanted to gain, places I wanted to go, things I wanted to make. While they were measurable (an important property of any goal!), I felt that they didn’t tell any story, any narrative. I started asking an important question: why was I doing all this? True, there is a superficial element of being able to check off items as I do them (a sort of a game), and also an important element of me understanding my friends better and thus understanding myself a little better, but that understanding was an outcome of the initial exercise of them giving me their suggestions. Who cared if I actually achieved these goals?

I decided to take another look at my plan. I wanted to come up with a unifying theme, something that could be used to derive the goals on my list. Some had to go as they didn’t fit into any theme. The rest made a lot of sense and seemed to connect to one another. I had a visceral feeling that these are the right goals, and that they drive towards something I wanted to achieve.

That’s when I came up with my two goals. I aligned the surviving items from the original 25 in a taxonomy that made a lot of sense to me that connected neatly with the goals. I added more. While I wasted some time (I wanted to retain my original deadline of October 5, 2009), I felt much better about the new list.

Which highlights the importance of the iterative approach.