The Sims, Goal Setting and Getting Shit Done

Why we make goal setting harder than it needs to be.

When I was younger, I used to play The Sims. I’m sure at least a handful of you reading are familiar with the game, but for those who aren’t here is a quick summary:

The Sims is a computer game, in which the ‘goal’ is to build a family and then control their life and desires. You can send your Sims out to get a job, you can make your Sims have children, you can take up hobbies and your Sims will feel the associated feelings of these scenarios, and it is your job as the player to manage those feelings and emotions.

As fun as it was, I never truly played it as intended. I used to enjoy building the house, furnishing the inside of the house and designing the people, which took you up to where the game was supposed to ‘start’, but I never got any further than that. My enjoyment came from the building and planning stage, thinking about what their house should look like (the fancier the better) and how my fictional characters were going to live in it, but then rather than actually playing the game as intended I would bulldoze it all down and start again.

This is a fairly similar process to a lot of challenges I am facing later in life. Often I will put a lot of effort into the initial stages or ideation stage, and then put minimal effort in or stop completely when I reach the execution stage. Typically I will make another attempt further down the line which predictably ends in the same way.

An example that I’m sure some of you reading may resonate with is building a website portfolio. Often the goal is to have somewhere to showcase your experiences, skills, writing, thoughts and creativity. But so often we over-emphasise the build process, taking pleasure in making a humble personal website so much more technically complex than it needs to be. Similarly to how I enjoyed building houses on The Sims, it is enjoyable to think as a developer or designer about the how and why to build something from scratch. The problem solving is fun. The upkeep and writing habits that follow are much less fun (for some).

Why do we do that? Sure, part of it is enjoyment, planning and building are fun - but I am convinced part of it is because is because we know the parts to follow the ‘building’ process are hard. We overcomplicate the original steps, because we are fearful about what is next.

Keeping your Sims alive and happy and fulfilled was really hard and at times tedious. You could start off with the best intentions, but at some point they would let the house get messy, set the house on fire or soil themselves into a depression. So I doubled down on the fact that I could waste my time building the most elaborate virtual houses and architecture as an excuse not to continue with the game.

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A portion of my role is spent working with engineers on goal setting, aspirations and ambition and I have noticed that we think about our own progression in much the same way. We put so much emphasis and complication on the initial goal setting stages and make things much more complex than they need to be. Often folk are reluctant to even try to set themselves goals without the input of a manager for this very reason.

Sure, goal setting is can be a minefield. There is so much conflicting evidence, frameworks (OKRs or SMART goals anyone?) and opinions out there that it becomes overwhelming. We adopt these frameworks to make our goals more ‘effective’, as if defining better metrics will somehow help us achieve things better. These frameworks have their place for sure, primarily for business level objectives and product goals. But I think we have started using this complexity as a safe place to hide, because we are avoiding the fact that executing on these goals is hard, time-consuming and sometimes painful by procrastinating. The more complex a goal, the more opportunity there is to fail.

Mark Manson wrote a great article called Question, which talks about people needing to ask themselves as to whether we are hungry enough to put up with the pain of achieving something before setting out to conquer it. Having aspirations is easy - everyone WANTS to be a millionaire, or a famous writer, or the creator of a technical masterpiece, but the process to achieve these things are sometimes a road we don’t want to commit to. Are we ok with the fact that our muscles are not as pronounced as they could be, or that we don’t have a musical talent or that we haven’t started leading a team at work and the sacrifice of achieving these things? Or is our appetite enough that we can put up with the discomfort of achieving these goals?

Nine times out of ten, we know what we want to achieve, and we know how we should achieve it.. but because it’s hard to do we get caught up in a loop of setting complex goals and self-reflection exercises, and usually end up burning ourselves out before we even get started.

Yes, building houses on the Sims was more enjoyable than goal setting, but in essence it is the very same thing. In the same way I would overthink and obsess about how far of a distance my swimming pool was away from the rear patio doors and let the details navigate how I played the game, is the same way we can overthink about how the ‘correct’ way to set a goal to lose weight is. What metrics do I need to track, what unique training methods and research do I need to collect, what time scales we need to work towards, what macros should I be consuming? We would likely have better and faster results if we just said: “I’m going to lose a stone” and then committed to eating less and moving more.

You must ask yourself. If you are struggling to achieve an ambition, is it because subconsciously you think it is not worth the pain to attain it?

A really useful exercise I have started doing is getting people to set goals as though they were setting them for someone else.. a friend, colleague or partner, whoever it may be. I tend to find we are much better at setting goals for others than ourselves, because we are not taking into account the effort that this approach takes because it does not apply to us. We keep it simple, to the point and actionable.

If someone came to you and asked how to learn a musical instrument, you could tell them to buy a guitar and dedicate time each day to practice it until you get good. Great! You have a goal and an action. But when it comes to ourselves we struggle to be this straightforward. We over complicate it, because we are avoiding actually doing it. We try and over-optimise to avoid the discomfort of carrying out the task, and in this case the ugly process of playing simple nursery rhymes and scales over and over until we get better.

Software engineers have never had it better. We have progression frameworks that list exactly what the expectations are we need to follow to get to the next step of our career. We have thousands of learning resources at our disposal. We have articles, books, podcasts and videos focused on teaching us how to be better engineers. There are people who speak openly about making the same journey in their careers as you are aspiring to do.

The answers are out there to help us achieve the things we want, and we are fortunate enough to be able to access them with ease. Setting goals to achieve our aspirations doesn’t need to be complicated. Let’s stop making it so because we are worried about tackling the process. After all, we can’t keep building virtual houses on a computer game forever and ever.

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I am opening up my time to taking on a small number of coaching clients, and if you are an aspiring engineer, engineer, engineering leader etc and goals/aspirations/ambitions is something you would like to chat to me about, then do let me know and get in touch via the email below: